This entry covers the stretch from July 1 to July 4, 2025.
Some weeks feel like a spilled palette: colors everywhere, some heavy, some light, but every stroke worth remembering. That was this one. A late-night food disaster, an absurd short-drama binge, long-awaited blog updates, and a rainy emergency at a village entrance all ended up packed into a few very ordinary days. Some of it was frustrating, some of it weirdly addictive, but looking back, it all felt vivid.
On the night of July 1, a coworker wanted to play Guandan. The games went smoothly, pretty evenly matched, and it was genuinely fun. Later that night I kept scrolling through blogs and just could not get sleepy. In the end I had to force myself into something like “sleep mode,” opened Douyin, mindlessly watched a few clips, and somehow drifted off.
My wife was on the night shift that evening. She had a handover at 3 a.m., and I also needed to keep an eye on the NT appointment registration for her. The plan was to accompany her remotely through the process the next day.
July 2 brought what can only be called a late-night overeating fiasco. A coworker was hungry, I was hungry, and there was not much around to eat except some flatbread made a few days earlier. After checking what we had, I found a little pickled pork left in the crock. I sliced up some chili peppers and garlic, and my coworker cooked a quick stir-fry of chili peppers with the cured pork. It smelled amazing, and we ate it with real enthusiasm.
Then around the middle of the night, things went bad. I started vomiting and had diarrhea, running back and forth to the bathroom. My stomach still felt off through the entire next day. I still believe the dish itself was probably fine—nobody else had any issue—so maybe I am simply not built for midnight meat.
At noon I really did not have the energy to cook, so I went out with coworkers from the village and had sour soup noodles with a bit of salt-and-pepper donkey meat on the side. That helped settle me somewhat. I had almost no appetite by dinner and only managed half a bowl of fried noodles just to get by.
What did wake me back up, oddly enough, was a short drama. In the afternoon I ran into a new series while scrolling Douyin. The female lead was pretty, the plot was the usual brain-off wish-fulfillment stuff, and before I knew it I had downloaded the Hongguo short-drama app and watched all 88 episodes in one go. The total runtime was about the length of a movie, but the format made it feel impossible to stop.
On July 3, I had actually set an alarm and planned to go running in the morning. Instead, I slept past eight and gave up on that idea entirely. Breakfast was one egg and a bowl of egg soup. At this rate, I was starting to feel like I was turning into an egg myself.
I skipped the cafeteria at lunch because someone in the village was hosting what we casually call a “market meal,” so a few of us went to join. I pulled all the best dishes closer to my side of the table, which got me laughed at by my coworkers. They said from now on they wanted to sit next to me at every such meal, because I made eating look way too enjoyable.
That afternoon I finally pushed out two updates for the blog circle. One page now displays blogs by year, and another organizes content by time range—recent 7 days, 30 days, the current quarter, this year, last year—and includes rankings for posts, active bloggers, and bloggers who have gone a long time without updating. I had been thinking about these features for a long time, and it felt good to finally get them online. The finer details can be polished later.
I skipped dinner that night and went hiking with a coworker instead. We only walked a little over 10,000 steps round trip, but it still felt like I had burned through all my energy for the day. On the way I got so thirsty that we stopped by a supermarket on the return and I bought a bottle of iced black tea—the cheap kind that costs 4 yuan. My coworker joked that it was a “loser drink,” but I like it, so that is that.
July 4 was all rain. It poured through the night, and around five or six in the morning I got woken up by the sound of rain hammering on the colored steel roof outside. To make it worse, I had forgotten to close the window. I muddled through the morning and wanted to make up for the lost sleep around noon, but the group chat kept going off. Every time I was about to drift off, another message woke me up. It was irritating in exactly the kind of way that leaves you mentally scattered.
The food at the cafeteria was not much better. Maybe it was because it was Friday, but both the stir-fried dishes and the rice felt hastily thrown together.
In the afternoon the rain picked up again. I asked a coworker when we were heading out, and he said to wait a bit. What we got instead of waiting quietly was a call from a supervisor: there was a risk of collapse near the entrance to one of the villages, and we needed to bring raincoats and warning tape and get over there immediately.
Once we arrived, it was clear the danger was real. The hardened surface of the road had been washed out until it was basically just a thin shell, while the soil underneath had already been hollowed away by the water. Step on it the wrong way and it could cave in. We quickly pulled up the warning tape, blocked vehicles from passing, and handled everything on site. The work lasted until nearly dark.
By the time we got back to town, the cafeteria cook had already gone off for the weekend, so one of my coworkers made dinner for us: yangyu gaibeizi. Hot food after a wet, exhausting evening hit especially well. By the time we finished eating, the sky had cleared, and we hurried to pack up and head home.
A rainy night, emergency work, physical fatigue, and a hot meal—put together, they created a very grounded kind of comfort.
Looking back on the week, it was messy and a little tiring, but in a strange way it felt more real than the stretch of repeated anxiety that came before it. Even the annoying parts—pulling warning tape in the rain, being woken by the sound of water on the roof, feeling sick after chili-fried pork—came with a sense of being involved in life rather than standing outside it.
When nothing happens at all, that is when things start to feel empty.
Hopefully next week is easier. And ideally, no more meat in the middle of the night.