網誌
2005年12月22日 下午11點43分53秒What the merry Christmas~~~
December 22, 2005 Thursday
3 days before Christmas, 21 hours before my 2000-mile roadtrip
Every year, Christmas always gives me a hard time.
Well...... it's already much better. Compared to 4 years ago, it was full of conflicts and unhappiness when I had Christmas with my host family in Buffalo. Now, I've built a much broader and stronger friendship network. I'm so welcomed to travel around the states in east coast, pretty assured that there are always some friends willing to take me. I tried very hard to adjust to the Christmas culture in US, except that I am still very skeptical and critical to the shallow merriness, social rituals, and utterly materialistic consumerism.
Still, Christmas is a very perplexing time for me. I know that I could never have a place here where I was born, raised, culturally aquainted and socially supported for 17 years, with all the high school buddies, parents, relatives and extended family surrounding me, like most of my friends have. I somehow feel jealous of them, I admit. I don't understand their enthusiasm towards what they regard the biggest holiday in the year, their yearning and their time spent on fanatic shopping for family and friends. I just have a hard time feeling in my heart that they are important, no matter I am a Christian or not. Who cares about Jesus's birth more exlicitly than the Santa Claus coming to town? Ask an American kid about that!
Perhaps this season serves as a reminder to me that I am still an alien. I don't belong to here. My English can be so fluent that a 800 GRE verbal score is a supereasy task for me; my friends can be so many that I just can't stop saying hi around campus; my achievement can be so great that a PhD, well-paid job, relationship & marriage, family and reputation are all satisfied to the uttermost. But in the solitude, under the quiet night, the immense loneliness overwhelms me. The loneliness is so great that my inmost being, with genuine humanity and sexual desires ("sexual" here refers to not just physical needs, but a more holistic(physical + emotional + social) needs deep in man/woman's personality as a sexual being --- adopted from "Equal to The Task"), steers my mind towards false images of intimacy with her (or multiple "her"s). Of course, in this imagery process, lust, selfishness and objectification are unleashed. Sin becomes inevitable. After that, a even greater loneliness comes back, but life must go on...... So I get up again from that private, contaminated place, make up myself as a brillant and promising Bucknell CS major, a sociable "Keamercules" or "Energy Sword", or a spiritual dorm study leader in InterVarsity. Still, the wonderful girls in my dream are so distant. I am not speculating, but in their world full of friends, "I am just an alien", a nice but strange guy from another side of the earth. Relationship? Impossible.
I remembered the intense feeling when Laura held my arm closely as we walked back together on that snow day! The intimacy is so close to reality! The minds grow cold, however. "Oh Keami I am not your type," she said, "You knew too much Bible." It's not about the Bible, it's about me. I am not the type of this world too.
Perhaps I write too much...... Am I crazy? Am I too pessimistic? I am just a lonely Chinese young man with a wandering heart, lo. I don't belong to this world. I know that my home is in the heaven, where my ultimate satisfaction will be found. Life is a sojourn --- that may be the most meaningful experience I will get from the upcoming 2000-mile roadtrip reaching through from New England to Tennessee. I just want to know how long will these expectations and turmoils be until the roadtrip of my life is over.
Lord, when will I come home?