I am pleased to announce, my friends, that I had broken a new record today...my record for being continously late (at least in college, I had been late for exactly 35 minutes to skip the morning exercise for four years in primary and middle school, and the class developed a phrase for my own personal use， “按时迟到”). For some reason, I had been late to every single class ever since the beginning of the semester, counting up to a total of 20 classes. The worst part of the whole thing is that I am usually only late from 36 seconds to 3 minutes, irritating the teachers and disturbing the students excessively. My favorite teacher had even jokingly asked me if i did this on purpose to add spice to her class. I had been trying to solve the problem, but nothing worked. My latest idea was that maybe this whole late thing is a vicious cycle. Maybe I got up late for 2 minutes on a certain day, probably on 27th, when classes began, and then did everything 2 minutes late (e.g. stayed in class 2 minutes after lectures to find out what I missed, resulting in going home/the next lecture 2 minutes late, going to dinner 2 minutes late, doing homework 2 minutes late and consequently sleeping 2 minutes late, cycling onto the next day.) Resolved to stop this problem, I got up at 5:00 a.m. today. This simple resolution led to one of the most messy days of my life. I crawled out of bed at 5:00 a.m. and started doing some of my reading, finding myself too sleepy to open my eyes, I took myself into a cold shower and treated myself to some ice-cream. Those simple manuvers resulted in a horrible cough which possessed me until several hours later. To warm myself up, I decided to clean my room, espicially my desk which had grown several inches in height (I wish I could grow taller that fast) due to the many books and papers I stacked on top of it in the last few days. An hour later, I satisfied myself with a shiny clean desk by tucking the papers left on it in drawers and plastic bags. I suddenly found out that the economics homework I did the day before was missing. Blown away by the wind, I persuaded myself....I looked at my watch, which said 7:30, meaning the printing resources are not open until 30 minutes later. With no internet, I engaged myself in reading a very nicely written romantic novel. I was so intrigued by the combination of romance, politics and history that when I looked up from the finished novel, it was already 9:30. I ran to ITS franticly, printed out the homework assignment and took it home with me. The weather was so nice that I indulged myself with walking slowly on the way back only to find out that when I reached home, it was 9:55. I scrambled on the economics homework assignment as fast as I could. There were many graphs to be drawn, and remembering the principles taught by my primary school teacher, I drew the lines straight with a ruler and measured each 90 degrees as carefully as I could. When I finished with the assignment, it was already 10:33. My first class began at 10:25. I quickly shoved my feet into a pair of slippers and ran out the front door only to learn the important fact that slippers fall off if you walk/run too fast. Due to the high-heeled nature of the slippers, I had to walk as elegantly as I could despite the fact that I did not want to. Those shoes sure taught me patience....When I arrived at the classroom door exhausted, it was already 10:40...Another record...I had never been more than 5 minutes late to a class before. I tried to slip into the classroom as silently as I could, mimicking the motion of ghosts, only to find myself nearly tripping over someone's backpack. I met pairs of angry glaring eyes...The teacher was very amiable and tried to ignore the disturbance. I sat down and looked at the messy homework in my hand partially drenched with sweat, and remembered the neat way it looked five minutes ago. I sat through the class, doing anything but listening to the lecture...I spent the first 5 minutes trying to get what the teacher was talking about, the next 10 minutes trying to concentrate, and the remainder time trying to keep my eyes open. I tried to follow the teacher with my eyes as he walked across the classroom from left to right, and from right to left. It was an attempt to keep my eyes moving instead of allowing them to hide behind closed eyelids. For some reasons, my eyes were not as flexible as I wished they were (maybe chlorine got into my eyes while I was trying to see through the water without goggles the night before at the swimming pool)? I found myself shaking my head slowly while the it was supposed to be my eyes moving around...The good news is that my attempt to keep awake was successful, and the bad news is beyond that, I got nothing out of the lecture. Just so that I can take all the blame, the professor's lecturing style was very interesting, intensive and it usually takes some medicine to fall asleep in his class(of course, there are some smart people who can still doze off without any help)...I congratulated myself on surviving through the lecture and went home to finish another paper. On my way home, I discovered the interesting fact that my keys are nowhere to be seen. I searched half the campus for my keys and returned home without them. The front door was locked and I banged on it in an attempt to get someone's attention so that they can open the door to get rid of the annoying noise...It proved that my housemates have very good endurance and no one opened the door (I later found out that the whole house was empty)...I tried to climb in through my back window, finding it luckily open...Maybe because of lack of exercise, it took my several tries to get in my room. Due to negligence of my house chores for the past half year, my window seal was very dirty and muddy. I looked like a zebra...Something bit at my feet and I found my keys lying under the bed...Well, anyway, I'd have an execuse not to clean my room next time...

Still half a day more to go, someone pray with me that the day won't prove to be messier than it is already. I know it is a 13th, but this is too...Oh, and if anyone would be kind enough to come up with some excuse or solution to my continously late problem, please...

I witnessed a police arrest for the first time in Worcester on Saturday night. It was cool outside and I was taking an afternoon walk near university park. Suddenly, I saw police chasing an old man. As I later learnt, he was suspected to possess and sell illegal drugs. After a few minutes, the old man was caught. And after some investigation, the police finally gathered enough evidence to convict him. It's the same old story--the evil getting what he deserves and the good winning in the end. This kind of story had been very satisfactory to me since childhood, but I could not help wondering if the old man really deserved the severe punishment. Quoting Thomas Moore in Utopia, "if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them ?" Could the old man really have helped it? He was dressed shabbily, and was yelling and spitting at the police during their investigation, he also spoke in a weird kind of dialect. Apparently, he wasn't well educated, maybe to a degree that his sense of right and wrong are beyond our comprehension. Or perhaps he committed the crime despite the knowledge that it is wrong. As can be observed from his dressing, he is a man with very limited means, hardly enough to keep body and soul together. Can we really blame him for doing something just to keep alive even though what his actions are horribly wrong?

Thinking about it gives me the creeps, but what if it had been me? What if I did not have a mother who believed that education was important and consequently been deprived of my right to education? What if my family had not considered it profitable for me to pursue a higher education? Presently, I have many doubts about my future, about what I would become. However, if I had been deprived of even a basic education, I would know without doubting where I would be... I could very easily end up in his position, or maybe even worse ones...

Sometimes, I complain about the situations I am in. Sometimes, I would ask why don't I have an Ivy League education instead of one at Clark? Why wasn't I born with a natural gift for poetry like Shakespeare? Why am I not as good at math as Leonhard Euler so that I would be creating the rules of mathematics instead of memorizing them? Why had I not been gifted with an eloquence such as that of Marcus Antonius or Winston Churchill? Why am I not as humorous as Mark Twain?....After witnessing the arrest, I stopped asking those questions and realized that I am already lucky to be what I am now. Even though I should not be content with my current abilities, because as they say, "satisfaction is the road to destruction", the least I can do is to make the best use of the abilities and resources I have and make everyday count.