Always Make New Mistakes

Yesterday, at the moment I was about to click to submit the last version of a paper, I held back. Then I opened the file and glanced at every paragraph, feeling that I had to send my son to the kindergarten finally. He is not a good son, though: almost every paragraph struck me as quite boring, imprecise, tedious, or suffering from any combination of these demerits. But fortunately, I seemed to have some good ideas about how to improve every sentence (though I did not yet have any idea about what a perfect work is like). This seemed to me to be a good sign, and I was convinced that I should always make new mistakes.  

Your Grandchildren

Well, I'm not surprised. The real question is whether their parents are themselves reasonably good people. But to my mind, many of them would get tired of giving a moment of unprejudiced thought to such questions as "Why should I live?" We care about smartphones, food and drink, cosmetics, and seek attention (deserved or not) on the net day after day. I don't mean that these things must be unworthy to do, but the is that we usually care too much about them while giving little or no attention to many other things. Yes, you can call it blindness. Our grandchildren will probably be even worse off, not only due to climate change.

The Way We Dance

I didn't like dancing or seeing people dancing, and never found myself able to appreciate any part of Hong Kong's popular youth culture (so some people said I was cynical and 老人精). But when I was leaving the cinema, I missed all the movements, all the steps, all their pain, and all their smile, all against the background of dance music. I have a hunch that《狂舞派》("The Way We Dance") will be considered by many film critics as a remarkable Hong Kong movie of all time.