Venting is a base emotion. Lin Song dislikes it when people get forceful and aggressive in their interactions. Perhaps it’s because, over the past few years, he has been so worn down by such overbearing attitudes that he feels his own lung capacity has diminished.
At noon, after dropping off Xiao Lin at the train station, he went to a client’s office to settle a payment. Coming down from the elevated departure level of the station, Lin Song began to wonder how he would kill the next two hours until his client’s office opened at two. It was too hot to stay out under the sun. The underground parking at the mall was only free for thirty minutes, which, after accounting for the time to drive in and out, wasn’t even long enough for a nap. Maybe he could find a diner on a small side street, have lunch, and enjoy two hours of free air conditioning. That seemed like a good option.
He turned onto Jiyu Road. The compact, two-lane road was surprisingly shaded, a sanctuary from the sun. It ran alongside Neisha Lake Park, where the dense canopy of trees blocked the heat completely. The “Start of Autumn” solar term had passed, and the summer heat seemed to be gradually fading.
Lin Song pulled his Peugeot 508 over to a wide spot on the roadside, leaving plenty of space in front and behind to allow oncoming cars to pass each other easily.
He didn’t turn off the engine right away. Instead, he left the AC on and fiddled with his phone for a while. He figured a twenty-minute nap would be enough. Just then, a black Volkswagen Golf pulled up and parked in front of him. A young man got out, took what looked like a parking ticket from his small bag, glanced around to make sure no one was watching, and deftly stuck the white slip onto his own car window before sauntering away.
The grand backdrop behind the reception desk of the Friendship Hotel was adorned with flowing, crimson auspicious clouds. Six pillars of alternating cream-white and beige marble stood in the lobby, and the office area featured a sculpture depicting elliptical electron orbits. You couldn’t call the hotel’s style tacky; it should be praised as grand, stable, and conventional.
Lin Song noticed a QQ icon still on his phone. He seemed to recall installing it once to send a large product manual to a client. In the past decade, that was probably the only time he had ever used it on his phone. He long-pressed the icon and uninstalled it. If you don’t use it, you don’t use it. If it’s gone, it’s gone. What’s destined to disappear will disappear eventually.
ChatGPT has already been upgraded to GPT-5, and its computing power is said to be infinitely greater than GPT-4o’s. To be honest, Lin Song now frequently uses ChatGPT in his daily work. His takeaway is that computing power and the result of a computation are two different things. If you only need to calculate something like “What is 1+1?”, there is no difference between a Casio calculator and a supercomputer from the user’s perspective.
Lin Song was prone to falling as a child; the scars on his knees were all from back then. He reflected on this: he was agile as a kid, so why did he fall so often? The answer was that when he moved quickly, he failed to first check his surroundings for danger. And so, getting hurt was inevitable.
Don’t envy those who wake up early to run: 75% of them are divorced, 15% are separated, and the rest are old bachelors.
At the gym, by the boxing ring, a little girl lingered in front of the glove rack for a moment. She picked out a pair of pink gloves and put them on her small fists. The massive gloves were strikingly disproportionate to her slender arms. The girl was immensely pleased, standing on the boxing platform and shadowboxing excitedly. However, she found no opponent and could only watch with envy as a woman lifted barbells nearby. Finally, the girl undid the straps and placed the gloves back on the rack.
And that is why we must let such flecks of color make every ordinary day a little less ordinary.
In the locker room, a burly uncle was giving a “recall past bitterness and appreciate present sweetness” lecture to a young guy who had joined him to lose weight. “Most people who get scammed are just greedy. Think about it, why do so many people not get scammed?” “I tell my wife now, don’t watch the commotion on the street while you’re walking. If you must look, stop and stand still. And don’t look at your phone while walking, it’s dangerous. Who the hell knows what you’ll run into.” “When I’m on the subway, I don’t like to look at my phone. I just sit with my eyes closed and rest.” “It must have been so boring for you guys without phones when you were kids,” a younger person chimed in. “We at least had e-books.” “We didn’t have any books to read back then,” the uncle retorted. “Even the Four Great Classical Novels were destroyed as part of the ‘Smash the Four Olds’ campaign. We’d get home from school at 3 PM, starving, and just grab leftovers from lunch and eat them cold. We’d mix saccharin with water and drink it like a soft drink.” This uncle even wore sunglasses at the gym. He liked to wear tight, stretchy clothes that highlighted his strong muscles. However, his less-tended stomach was beginning to develop a bit of a “general’s paunch.”
There are always people who pontificate from on high: “What I see are the victims of cyberbullying… and the incompetence of their employers, their relatives, and their friends! Especially their direct supervisors!”
This raises a rather heart-piercing question: If a person is incompetent, do they deserve to be cyberbullied? And if an incompetent person is subjected to cyberbullying, isn’t that merely a reflection of the incompetence of society itself?