In return for light, we’ve given up the beauty of the stars. We didn’t understand anything back then, but we looked up at the sky every night in awe at the glittering canvas above us. And since we didn’t know anything, we imagined, and created magnificent stories of what we saw in the sky; heroic warriors with star-studded shields battled glittering serpents, their arrows streaking across the sky. We couldn’t tear our eyes away. As we grew older, we learned more, and our gaze shifted downward, inward. We moved forward; we learned and discovered and understood the stars that we used to watch. We know that they’re called binary systems, red giants, and supernovae; we know they’re made of hydrogen and helium, and they burn hotter than we can imagine. But we stopped looking at them, and now all we can see are the glow and shimmering of city lights. Neon lights, stoplights, streetlights, headlights, fluorescent lights. They keep us awake at night. They guide us in our quest for answers, success, life, happiness. We’ve willingly forsaken the stars, because what can they offer us? We know now that they’re millions and billions of miles away, that they’re not actually heros and monsters and gods. They betrayed us; they enchanted us with their radiance, deluded us with fantastic tales, and then left us disappointed and empty. So we extinguish them with our artificial lights, forget the childish stories. In our spite we strip them of their mystical qualities, reduce them to atoms and physics, chain them with rules we make up. We know exactly what they are, we know how they move, we know when they were born and when they will die. No longer will these deceitful stars mesmerize us with their beauty. Resolutely, we look down at the ground, at our steps forward into a future lit by our own knowledge. Now and then, we look up, past the streetlights, past the skyscrapers, past the airplanes, and past the moon. But we don’t see anything. We fool ourselves thinking that the blinking lights of an airplane is the twinkling of a bright star, that the orbit of a satellite is the arc of a racing comet. Because we can’t see the real stars anymore, and we stubbornly tell ourselves that we don’t want to, don’t need to. But at night, we lie awake, with the curtains tightly shut, the door locked, the lights turned off. And we stare up at a ceiling plastered with fake, plastic, phosphorescent stars from our childhood, and we pretend to trace the constellations.

I was watching a webcast of an introductory astronomy course.

It’s about midnight, and I’m in the top bunk of a bed when I hear my younger brother (by about four years) telling me to pick up the phone because he needs to tell me something important, even though he’s in the same room as me. (It doesn’t strike me as weird, more like it’s a kind of tradition between the two of us. And I don’t actually have a younger brother.) The phone rings, I pick up the receiver, one of those big, old-fashioned cream-colored ones, and he starts telling me about all these things that he’s worried about. He sounds really stressed, so I do my best to try to comfort him. We talk for what feels like hours and I can actually see the sky getting brighter, so I’m really groggy when we hang up the phone, but then I see it’s only about a quarter to one.

[Unimportant bit
I think I decide to take a walk or something and end up on a street near my house, where I run into one of my friends (Hi Joy! if you ever read this) with two other people that I know (but she shouldn’t). We end up at a brightly lit shop, where I leave them and continue walking, up the hill that leads to my high school. I run into three other guys along the way, all people that I know.
/] 

I’m back in a house and there’s some sort of party going on, with a bunch of little kids. My brother is there, except he’s even younger now (like six years old? but I’m still the same age), and he offers me some sour punch candy straws, green and yellow. I take a green one, and continue into the other room where I need to fix something. 

Midnight
To dream that it is midnight indicates that you need to face reality.

Bunk bed
To see bunk beds in your dream represent childhood and innocence. Alternatively, it may refer to diverging and conflicting views of sexuality. You may have difficulties expressing your needs and desires.

Brother
If you do not have a brother and dream that you have one, then he may symbolize characteristics that you need to acknowledge within yourself.

Telephone
To dream that you are having a telephone conversation with someone you know signifies an issue that you need to confront with that person. This issue may have to do with letting go some part of yourself.

Party
To dream that you are at a party suggests that you need to get out more and enjoy yourself. (HAHAHA)

Children
To see children in your dream signify an aspect of yourself and your childlike qualities. You may be retreating back to a childlike state and longing for the past. You are trying to still satisfy repressed desires and unfulfilled hopes. 

Candy
To see or eat candy in your dream symbolizes the joys and the special treats in life. It also represents indulgence, sensuality and/or forbidden pleasure. You may be devoting too much time to unimportant issues.

Fixing something
To dream that you are fixing something indicates that you need to reevaluate and rethink a situation or relationship in your life.

So basically…I need to confront myself, and not be so repressed?

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I have a very hard time remembering things that happened in the past (and not just things long ago either). I might know the facts of those events, but actual memories are barely there. It makes me feel rather disconnected sometimes. Is this normal? :S

I’m reading a book on the history of various chinese words/ phrases, and thought I’d share some of the interesting ones.

This one is interesting not because of the history of the phrase, but just because some parts of the story are incredibly ridiculous. 

「月老」or「月下老人」is a god who watches over marriages and is like a matchmaker of sorts. You might’ve heard of him in Chinese or Japanese stories that say that two lovers are linked by a red string. Yue Lao is the god who ties these strings around people who are fated to be together. 

The first appearance of Yue Lao in written history was during the Tang Dynasty. A guy called Wei Gu wanted to get married, but never found the right person. One time he went on a trip and a friend wanted to introduce him to another man’s daughter. Wei Gu readily agreed and they decided to meet the next morning. Wei Gu was super excited and got up before the crack of dawn to go to the meeting place. Along the way he spotted an old man sitting on the curb, reading a book by moonlight. He was curious so he looked over the old man’s shoulder and was surprised when he couldn’t read a single word in the book. So he asked the old man what he was reading and the old man ended up telling him that he was the god of marriages, so Wei Gu asked him to look into his marriage for him. Yue Lao did and told him that his future wife was only three years old and that he’d have to wait until she was seventeen to marry her. Since the girl that Wei Gu’s friend introduced stood him up, Wei Gu went with Yue Lao to see his future bride, who happened to be living pretty close by.

When Wei Gu saw the toddler, he decided that she was extremely ugly. So he asked Yue Lao, “Can I kill her?” (what the heck?) Yue Lao replied, “She’s going to grow up to be very rich, why the hell would you kill her” (the heck again? so yeah go ahead and kill her if she’s not gonna be rich?) Anyway, Wei Gu offered a bunch of money to any servant who successfully kills the girl, and one of them took the offer. But he messed up and ended up stabbing her between the eyebrows. (It doesn’t say whether he got the money or not…)

Life went on for Wei Gu, and he still never managed to find a suitable person to marry. Fourteen years later, he went off the join the army, and the governor took a liking to him. The governor marries his daughter to Wei Gu. The daughter is extremely beautiful but always wore a 花鈿 (a kind of makeup common in ancient china, includes headdresses and stickers of flowers or other designs they put on their face) on her forehead. Wei Gu couldn’t stand it after a while and forced her to tell him why she always wore it, even in the shower. So she told him that she was stabbed there when she was little by some thug. Wei Gu asked some questions to make sure it was the same person he had stabbed, then very excitedly said, “I was the one who had you stabbed!” and told her the whole story about Yue Lao. And from that day on their relationship became better and better (WHAT?!?!?).