Original Link: Thrimbda’s Crew
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An unexpected encounter:
While biking to a deserted area, a nail ambushed me 👊
Then, as I was waiting by the roadside at an intersection for a pickup truck, a very professional-looking cyclist passed by. We chatted for a while and found out we even live quite close to each other. We exchanged contact info, and thus I gained a new cycling buddy.
Fox-senpai sent me sleep magic. I’ll sleep straight through to National Day! Praise him, praise him! 😎
(single rhyme x4)
Guess whose birthday it is today ☺️
Hope I won’t encounter the oncall gift pack again )
After working with Zheng Zheng, my body clock completely shifted westward.
By this calculation, I’m right in the Iran Standard Time zone of UTC+3:30.
So, I’ll post some photos of Iran~
Photo 1: Brought gifts from the ancient East to the kids at a kindergarten in Tehran. The children in Iran are incredibly cute — I really wanted to sneak one home to raise!
Photo 2: Visited a Kazakh friend’s place for hookah. He absolutely loves China and dreams of learning Chinese one day so he can come live there.
Photo 3: Took a stroll with an Iranian friend on some high ground in Qazvin. Although Iran is a Muslim country, it’s quite secularized. This friend’s daily mantra was “f**k the religion!”
Photo 4: In the Grand Bazaar of Isfahan, a freshly cleaned pool. A little girl walked past, and I slipped into a trance where the mind triumphed over matter, as if time froze at that moment.
Iran is a truly fascinating place.
The citizens’ lives are supported by very generous welfare: almost free education means many people hold doctorates; all restaurants give away bread (naan) for free, and you often see people carrying huge stacks of naan from bakeries on the street; gasoline is extremely cheap, so almost everyone owns a car—though some cars cost as little as 2000 RMB and are pretty unsafe, and on a four-lane road you’ll often see six or seven cars driving abreast, nobody follows traffic rules—shocking, really. The RMB goes a long way there, but the food basically consists of various types of kabab and naan, and the rice has a really strange shape.
From what I observed, not many people in Iran are genuinely religious.
Ultimately, Persian culture is somewhat distinct from Islamic culture, which creates a subtle inner conflict in people’s minds. As an ancient civilization, Iranians have a strong sense of cultural pride and a big-country mentality—as a Chinese, I can easily relate to that.
Spices are everywhere in Iran, and the indoor cleanliness of various buildings is unexpectedly excellent.
Saffron is a specialty of Iran; supposedly each person can only take 200g out of customs. Any more than that is smuggling. How do I know? When I was flying back, the person behind me at security got randomly checked—they found 300g and it was confiscated, I think. And I, who had already passed security, was trembling as I thought about the 300g of saffron in my suitcase…
“Nice song, and maybe a silent story behind to dig.”
“I’m a bit obsessed with them lately. I was obsessed with Tessellate. Been a fool not to dig them out.
Until a couple of things about them happened in a row.
That’s true about a lot of things. Finally gets your attention only after it keeps turning up in your life several times straight at some point.“
“Agree.”
It rained heavily today, and I didn’t even feel hungry enough in the evening to go out and eat. Remembering I still had a box of Indomie instant noodles from last year, I cooked two packs.
…I didn’t expect that even after a year, I’d still have a bit of an adverse reaction to the taste. Not because it’s bad—objectively speaking, these noodles taste pretty good.
But during last year’s lockdown, I ate at least two and a half cases—two and a half cases means 75 packs.
At first, I still had supplies to make decent food: galangal chicken, beef brisket stew with tomato, beef soup, beef curry, and then fried rice with leftovers the next day.
Later, the only ingredients my poor cooking skills could handle were onions, potatoes, and carrots.
So I made curry, then fried the leftover rice the next day—rinse and repeat. As time went on, I got lazier and lazier, even too lazy to make curry. Except for the occasional group-buy KFC pizza, I just ate Indomie instant noodles—two packs a meal, four packs a day.
Back then, I lived on the first floor, which had a small yard, so I went skipping rope every day. Apart from growing lazier, my mental state was actually fine.
But one problem with the first floor was the endless stream of tiny insect visitors.
Slugs crawled in through the hole where the air conditioner pipe passed through the wall. I later put some salt and a garlic clove there, and never saw them inside again. But the scene in the yard was still spectacular. After the rain stopped, at least a hundred dried-up slugs gathered at the back door like pilgrims.
Then came the cockroaches. In that room, I saw a southern cockroach for the first time. At 1 a.m., it sat on the wall for an hour, and I stood frozen staring at it for an hour. Then it started running. I was terrified, flinched so hard my glasses fell off and I even stepped on them. Then it disappeared. I felt gross and couldn’t fall asleep until after 3 a.m. (I called in sick the next day).
The cockroaches showed up about once a week—either whole, or half or quarter pieces left after my cat Grape mutilated them. Grape became my savior. Every time I saw a live cockroach, I’d coax Grape with treats to deal with it.
And finally, the June beetles. They sounded like fighter jets when they flew, buzzing loudly in my head. But they visited less often, and I never hurt them. I’d usually catch them and release them outside—though I was still trembling.
I feel like that lockdown turned me into a total homebody.
Indeed, what we can feel and what we can express are two different things.
I struggled and deleted long, scattered paragraphs that couldn’t capture the point.
From now on, I need to consume more, suck the marrow out of everything, and express more.
Sucking the marrow out of my own bones, I guess!
Earlier I said I’d write a short essay to recommend Copenhagen to everyone. I’ve been grunting and slogging through it for nearly half a week, and I still haven’t finished.
After a day of writing painfully (yet with a hint of pleasure), I complained bitterly to playground. I said I finally understand some writers’ bad habits—why they smoke, drink, run, swim, do all kinds of things.
He: “Is it like this when you write code?”
I thought for a moment: “Rarely. Unless I’ve been going full-throttle all day on some complex set of changes, but that really doesn’t happen often.”
The reason I don’t get exhausted when writing code is that I can usually control the complexity of a change pretty well. I already have decent self‑control: when implementing features, I suppress my soul’s urge to refactor; when refactoring, I suppress my soul’s urge to rewrite (strike out the last half sentence).
Writing articles—I’m way too inexperienced. It’s totally “two lines take three years to come, tears flow before I can speak.” On one hand, I always feel what I write is garbage; on the other hand, I have to endure that and still produce something. While choosing words and phrasing, I want to accurately express those intangible things I feel, and I also need to think about structure—not top‑heavy, not inconsistent, not scattered like a pile of sand.
Then, as this process goes on, I completely lose the ability to judge what I’ve written.
But I will finish it. This flag must not fall.