The predicament with whether one should start a blog begins with deciding whether it should be about yourself or your environment.
A common background for Hong Kong students was the 12 years of education that was washed by religious schemes, while a mere amount of kids understood the significance of religion in social context. Most public-funded schools worship a certain God, fully aware that young, liberal minds that didn’t grow up believing in Santa also wouldn’t think that a man who self-declared as Messiah can turn water into wine. For the 12 years, carving the gestural prayer rituals into my muscle memory, hymns and carols sang in the language of the Anglo-Saxons, studies of the Holy Bible that some grew up to despite, the feeling of a confused respect towards priests and those who claim to converse about their sins — privately.
I have always felt reluctant to label myself as an atheist, partly to make myself less punk, less rebellious, if it works that way. I see religion as a reliance, since deities are intangible, beliefs grow invulnerable, by putting one’s limited mind upon something unmeasurable, there is no stronger medicine than ones that tell you nothing matters. Why do I care about whether I am atheist? How are people in power shaking hands when they operated the blood-dripping slaughter machine the same day? Why do we not have Wilko and Poundland anymore? Why are people trying so hard to make art that only a tiny fraction of society could understand, if they bothered to keep up with the contemporary theories that required constant reading?
One of the greatest virtues of human condition is growth. For a mind to prepare itself for reflection comes the process of analyzing the exterior, pairing with experience to compromise between moral contradictions. Capitalizing oneself’s benefits at times requires societal sacrifice, for an oligarch to kill, he must find ways to professionalize his savagery; for a government to hide, they must first announce their plan to prosper; for a person to grow kind, they must first come to terms with their evil.
No expectations of what home would look like when I go back, I’m sure the air would taste fresher and the wine lingers sweet, for when I yield to guilt as I leave prints on the land I once left.
Knowing little of myself, and underqualified to comment on the world that I grow a stranger in, here writes an introduction, a column that is neither about myself, nor the bullshits around me. An autobiographical, anecdotal commentary, to a world I don’t belong.
