It’s always around 3 or 4 days after not writing anything that I want to write something again. A bit of a cycle, I guess. It’s okay to not write every day, although that would be the best. But number one, I don’t have stuff to write about every day, and I may not want to write down stuff every day.

I guess I slept well last night, even though I went to bed too early (at 9 PM) and got up too early (at 6:30 AM) as well. I didn’t shower last night, so it became the (unordinary) first thing I did this morning. The water boiler was still on its timer after I finished showering, demanding me to press the “boil” button manually. For breakfast, I had a ham, lettuce, and cheese sandwich he made me with the no-egg, no-dairy toast I baked on last weekend, and he microwaved two buns I made two days ago and cut a whole apple into slices – just the very ordinary home-made food we always have.

I haven’t posted any polls on Mastodon for a while since I haven’t gotten a time to overwrite the default setting of allowing a poll to have only four options. I asked him to help me with this and he implemented the change in 10 minutes, thanks to all the resources available on the internet. At 9 AM, I was sitting in front of my laptop, ready to chat with A on Zoom as scheduled. The chat went well, and I guess it was as intense as usual, just like all the previous chats we had. She updated me some fun and horrible stories from the AI world, and the AI-generated, nonsensical mouse-and-testicle image seriously disturbed me (I remembered why I didn’t open that new article upon first seeing it…) I could see that we are both aging, that there are lines around her eye corners and dark circles under my eyes. Tiredness was seeping out from both of our screens – if not from mine, then definitely from hers. I wasn’t too keen on listening to why she’d never wanted to pursue a UX researcher career, but I didn’t say anything. At this moment, the last thing I need to be reminded of is how my decision of leaving academia and becoming a UXR might be wrong. I know she was only reflecting on her situation, but it was related to my profession anyway.

I also heard of some other horror stories from another friend L before meeting with A. One of L’s childhood friends – a woman – is fighting with her husband and very likely to divorce him. The couple have been together since college and have both did their Master’s in the US and stayed in the States afterward. Two or three years ago, the woman, with reasons unknown to me, became very eager to leave the States and go back to China. Since the couple hadn’t obtained US permanent residency at that time, this plan of returning to China was postponed until they both got the Green Card. The story I heard today happened after they went back to China: the couple are not living in the same city; the woman lives in Beijing at her home with her parents (I suppose) and the man lives in Shanghai. Apparently, the man has only discovered his “real” worth on the dating market in China by finding “a new sense of freedom and pleasure” from all the young girls who are eager to court him due to his wealth and him holding the US Green Card. “Whether he had a mistress is unknown,” L said, “but it sounds like the guy had been to locales that provide sex services and had sought for the service for sure.” So it was the man who had asked for a divorce, and it looks like he is very determined to pursue his newly-gained “freedom and pleasure” by becoming single again.

I don’t know either of the couple personally, but to me, divorce seems to be the right thing for both of them. If the man wants to divorce because he wants to be able to sleep with young girls, then there’s nothing to hold him and his wife together, so it’s better to separate. On the other hand, I hope the wife can also find a way out for herself. Finding a way out to leave her husband, finding a way out to move on, and finding a way out for a new life.

Was I disturbed upon hearing this story? More or less, as I’m well aware of the precarity of the traditional, heterosexual marriage. I was thinking if the couple could stay together were they on an open relationship. Perhaps? L had told me a long long time ago that she didn’t trust any men. “Having extramarital affairs is a default for all married men,” she said. I recall some divorce and near-divorce scenes I witnessed when I was a kid, a combination of nasty fights, indistinguishable screams, and regrettable tears. But right now I can only feel a sense of boredom. How boring the adult world is, how profoundly lack of fun it is.