Short dream of life

Since my friend starts to write a blog in English as a practice, I feel a burden to do some practice as well.

There are only three un-English native speakers in my group: My advisor, a postdoc (Indian), and I. The rest of 6 others are either American or British. Furthermore, there are only two students in Astronomy are un-English natives. As a result, I dip myself into surrounding that requires lots of listening and speaking practices. While these practices are informal, and my grammar, vocabulary, presentation and writing skills remain untrained.

Scientific writing and regular writing are different stories. People don't speak, write, listen like working on scientific articles, even if they are a scientist. Scientific writing can even be considered as a dialect based on English. Improve skills in scientific writing would be another story.

Nevertheless, I had been interested in writing in English so that I can present some of my thoughts that I considered attractive to others (other girls mainly). It turns out the hard-working does not pay off in the way I expected, and I'd start doing that since I went through depression last winter. However, it is never too much to try again. Besides, I still consider myself as a creative person.

Today I want to talk about the life I want. "The life I want" has never been set as a goal in any kind of mind training I've done. It is not a specific target that can be achieved, rather a style of life. It's something that though I constantly thought of, would not take action until I find myself independent, free in time, and well paid. The same idea as "I want a dog when I find a job." Recently this "checklist of future life/ day time dream" become much clear as I live alone, and understand myself more.

So this is what I want:


I will have a house. The house service three function: 1) a nice kitchen 2) a library, 3) a garden

The kitchen will have an island so that I can chop food, baking without feeling crowded. This island would be big enough that I can place dishes while holding a party, yet the party never happened. I live alone with no guests. The kitchen would also have three different coffee machines. The color of the fridge will be sliver instead of white plastic. The sink will be deep enough that sometimes I can be lazy and not have to wash dishes immediately.

The library, of course, will have books that I never read: Old physics book, art books, and novels that someone recommend me to read and I bought them so that I can talk to them, which never happened. The sofa will be tough, and the floor is either carpet or wood. There is one dining table so that I can have my breakfast and coffee there. I will do my painting in the library as well.

Now these two things above are on my list for a long time. When I travel to Switzerland and visit a rich family (my sister's host), I realize these are important to me. The rich family has a sauna room, pool room, and cellar for wine. Yet the kitten is not as big, and the coffee machine is Nestle espresso cup machine. That's a pity.

Also, I didn't mention that a nice, clean, bright bathroom is also essential. Although I spend less than one hour in the bathroom a day (since I do not poop 4 times a day), a bad experience of using the bathroom can ruin the whole day. This is one of the "Peak-End Rule" for me. (Peak-End Rule means that the peak moment and the ending strongly influence the overall memory.) So yeah, a good bathroom, add that into the list.


The garden is a new thing. I lived in my Aunt's place for two months when I was 10. They have a backyard that by the time I didn't appreciate it as I should. The recent backyard I spend my time on was in France. I had a big hike without a good plan, and end up exhausting climbing 5 hours in the snow. That day I lied in the hot tub in the backyard, staring at the mountain I just survive from, and realized that you can only enjoy staying in a garden when you truly relax. Truly relaxing may rarely happen in my future life, but that will also be some rare moment that I will remember even long after.

I start planting indoor onion this year. The original idea is that if I grow them I can eat fresh and free green onion when I ever want. It turns out that green onions are super easy to grow. A bundle of green onion from a grocery store, a glass of water, change the water every other day, done. And the only problem is that it grows so fast that now I have to think of what I have to eat to include green onion. Later on, I find that garlic also needs little care to grow, and so does mint. The best part These plants can be grown indoors, and you can take care of them during winter. At this moment I start to think about what if I can grow most of my vegetables myself? That is why I'm going to add one more thing on my list of fascinating life: a garden.


I shall talk about some other ideas. Some that I learned recently from a book about the art of life. One thing in the book is that people should learn that most of our fortune we have are mainly from luck rather than hard-working, and it would be better we set a line for ourselves. This line will be set such that we can have a comfortable life, yet not having too many wastes and luxury. The rest of what we earn can then be used for charity, environment conservation, and medical research donation.

I should dig deeper into this topic, but now I think I'll just leave it next time.