Dear potato

Dear little potato,
I dream of you nearly every night.
When I walk by the vegetable counter in a supermarket,
I cannot keep myself from gazing at your moon-surface-like face.
You keep such a low-key style that you never show off.
However you are shiny in my eye and your beauty will never fade away.
Though I'm going to cut you up right now,
You will always stay in my heart.

with an orchid

When I first heard the song “with an orchid,” I was busy preparing for SAT and the enormous vocabulary requirement really drove me mad. Facing Barron Critical Reading and Core Vocabulary 3500 all the time, spending every night in a single room in a library, being frustrated by the score after finishing every practice test, I was really bored and thought life plain. I started to lose the idea why initially I decided to prepare for SAT. People that kind of situation fickleness. I could hardly find a reason to keep fighting.

That was a summer night when I finished a day’s assignment and started to randomly listening to programs on iTunes. I came across the song “with an orchid.” The beginning of the song was like a storyteller slowly saying “A long time ago…” in a quiet background. It was also like the narrow and shadow origin of a stream. I expected the stream would gradually follow wider, but there seemed to be an unexpectable steep cliff—the melody flew suddenly and naturally into a vast plain area, and then it deepened and deepened, sometimes jumped like a naughty child. The night was silent and there was wind. I was guided into a wonderland following the melody.

Just like a cool breeze in the hot summer, or a clear stream going through a desert, the song reminded me of the beauty of life and my dream to explore the outside world. The later part of the song which was magnificent influenced me to look further, beyond the practice themselves to pay more attention on the beauty of the language and the beauty of the writing skills. In that way, the song changed me.

comfort zone

Grown up in China, I had hardly heard anything about the "comfort zone" until I attended a Foreign Language School. Since young, I had been told to "keep close to your fellows in order to show unity." So in kindergarten, our class went to the dinning hall at noon in an intense line led by the teacher. In primary school when there was a class trip, I was told to seat next to my classmate on a bus even though there were still unoccupied seats. I once sat in a 70-meter-square classroom with another 50 students in the junior middle school. Sometimes I to stand in a twisted queue in a small poorly-ventilated room with arm next to another sweating arm, just as the case when I was in Shanghai EXPO. Sounds disgusting, right? However, that is the truth. 

In Western countries, keeping the comfort zone is appreciated. Lines in front of cashiers are loose here. People would rather stand than sitting close to a stranger on the subway. When people greet with each other, they tend to keep a distance of one meter in order to be polite or thoughtful.

I believe that to keep personal comfort zone is necessary. However, we have such a large population that the average space for a person is quite limited. Maybe that is why Chinese don't pay much attention to comfort zone.