#1 [原创]diary: An ordinary day in an ordinary life
5/21/09
7:05, I woke up. First thing is to start my computer, then I prepared some quick-and-easy breakfast, bacon/milk/bread/eggs, and tried to wake up my kids. I have 8am meeting with French customers, my husband always take over the kids just 5 mins before 8am, he sent them to school. I normally sit at my computer in working meetings from 8am, sometimes 7am. After two hours’ work, I had a quick shower, then powered off laptop and packed it up to drive to office.
Driving to office is always a pleasant and soothing experience, it takes about 25 mins, I prefer taking express-way instead of highway so I can be more calm and listen to the music or radio talks , and enjoy the nice scenery along the way. I go to office 2 days a week though I’ve been working from home solely for the past 1.5 years. I work with Europeans a lot, I have an excuse to go to office less often, and I am a part-timer, with 4 days 8 hours schedule. Well, it’s good to have a change in the routine, one day at office, one day at home. Small variation is enough to make one feel better about work.
While driving, I soaked my mind in music or radio discussions, there are many ordinary drivers like me along the way, looking at their facial expression can be interesting too. People who rides bike normally attract my attention more, most of them wear colorful attire, with a bag attached to the bike, and helmet, they generally have good-looking body shape, and they appear radiant , energetic, and fit to me. In fact, they look cool comparing the boring majority who drive cars. Minority always appear interesting to majority.
I remember it was just the opposite in China, when I was riding a bike to middle school, among a huge crowd of bike riders, I didn’t feel ‘cool’ comparing to the car drivers, they love to hank and shout, and I collected all the dust and noise left behind by them. It got worse during the winter season where the road surface was icy and slippery, it was scary to ride bike on an icy road.
The pleasure of driving is to give your fuzzy mind a chance to wander and explore, I always have a lot of fascinating thoughts while driving， although they disappear quickly like the thin and moving clouds in the blue sky. Thinking is a great activity, no thinking is even better. Just be, it is liberating and therapeutic, that’s what life should be, like a river flowing through, it goes wherever it likes to with no destination.
I arrived in office, followed by the computer work and more work. Nothing much to say about that. Everyone knows it is the same as farmer laboring their effort in the field. It can be stimulating if you want it to be. You can feel bored if you prefer to think that way. It’s your choice to make for any particular day.
Of course we know we are all poor Sisyphus…. Who are rolling the rock to the mountain top repeatedly, later only seeing it coming back again and again. But you can still imagine he is happy.
At lunch, I chit-chatted with an office philosopher, he is an Indian guy, always sounds like a philosopher to me. His philosophy is the almost same as mine, be happy and enjoy life as much as you can, and sometimes we do need to utilize our limited reasoning power to interpret the madness of the world as it is, we can’t help it. Some co-workers do not like him , as he is too talkative, either small group or meetings with large audience, he always have something to say. But he is an interesting person overall. His wife does not work, he has to support the family so his main goal is to keep the job, and be happy, the rest does not matter to him, and he is a hard-working and responsible person as everyone else is here.
4pm, I drove home as traffic is light. To drive back home is a even more relaxing trip though I am not done with all my work yet. I know there is always too much work to do, I certainly should leave some for tomorrow, there is no need to hurry up to get everything done quickly. the efficiency and speed has its limit, once you pass the limit, you can become obsess with it, then you start to lose the pleasure of enjoy doing one thing at a time.
Never attach to anything, especially your work, you can work hard, at the same time having a sense of detachment will certainly keep you sane. One thing I dislike corporate world is the management always push everyone to get things done quickly due to the competition, that’s what make people’s lives miserable as people has no time left for true enjoyment of life, which is what we are here for.
I got home, first thing is to turn on my computer again. I did some wrap-up work, and also helped my son with his homework.
5:40pm, I started cooking for dinner. I am not that a good cook, but kids love simple stuff, when I make complicated and delicious Chinese food, they ignore it, they pick the easiest and simplest thing to eat. So I changed my strategy, life becomes simpler with sandwiches, cheese quesadilla, Japanese wudon noodle.
After dinner, my husband cleaned the dishes. I remembered that i need to send my daughter to dance school for photography , the location is 16-miles away our home. My son begged me to go to school open house at 7pm, he was upset that I decided otherwise, I felt sorry for him but could not split myself into half like Monkey king could do. He was not happy and had a fight with her sister. Finally my daughter and I found an escape to run into our car. When we drove home it is almost 8:40pm, time for kids to be go to bed.
9:10. Kids in bed . Normally I will read books before the sleep to wind down myself for the day, however, today is special. I have to watch production job tonight as I had a software release last Saturday.
Production job went smooth initially, I was relieved, waiting for the last email notification (from production) to arrive in my inbox. However, I kept waiting till 10pm. Shoot, something is not going right. It should not take this long, it generally finish around 9:40pm. I had to login to system to find out what’s going on. As the European are going to start their day soon, if they find their report is not working, they will scream and shout, then escalate to management right away, French people are not patient, they like to escalate to someone else, so that they can be free from the problem they face. Last year they put us in crisis mode, and forced everyone working 20 hours a day to resolve their crisis.
I will shorten the long story, the business 'screamed' in their angry email that they need resolution within one hour, they need their report immediately, otherwise, xx million dollars would be lost, blah, blah, blah….After many meetings, updates to management, many consultants from vendor company looking at this critical issue, (you can imagine everyone was running like rats, but has no clue what’s going on). Suddenly the system crashed (it went down for unknown reason), later the system finally was started again, my job magically moved so quickly to completion, I couldn’t believe my eyes, it’s 5:30am. In fact the issue has nothing to do with my changes, but it has to do with system resource issue, I didn’t feel sleepy only with excitement and found it quite amusing that so many people looked at one problem as if the world is about to end soon, and I was the center of the universe in this whole madness, it’s nice to be ‘famous’ and crazy ‘all-nighter’ once in a while.
6:30am, I dropped ‘dead’, and slept till 10:45am. I got up, I felt lightheaded but relieved. It feels good to work extremely hard sometimes and to the level of exhaustion, why not？ life itself is exhausting, but if you don’t fear about getting into that state, and go straight into it, it can gradually turn into joy at the same time.
A picture surfaced in my mind, when one travels in the dark, sooner or later you come across the light . If you have not seen the light yet, just keep going. At the end of darkness, it is the light. At the end of the suffering, it is pleasure. Without suffering, the pleasure does not even exist!
Sometimes, life sucks, but it is interesting.
～写点英文的，打字很快。
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