In moments of muddled drifting, there are always certain knots in the heart that refuse to be smoothed out. Perhaps it is the various small misfortunes accumulating, bit by bit. In ordinary times you don't really feel them, perhaps because amid the busyness there is never any quiet stretch in which to listen to the voice of your own heart. Smelling all sorts of unpleasant odors, hearing all sorts of grating sounds, plus the anxiety and panic that surface in the mind from time to time, along with the emptiness and listlessness left behind when a dream collapses -- all of it is like one viscous bubble after another rising out of a swamp, slowly swelling but refusing to burst. Using busyness to escape from quiet thinking, filling fragmented time with all kinds of trivial small matters, thinking about doing this one moment and that the next, multithreading forward simultaneously yet making barely any progress, until in the end it looks as if you know a little about every area, but the moment it comes to actually putting any of it into practice, you can't manage it anywhere. This is very bad.
Writing a few words is a fairly good way of relieving it. "I use my pen to express my heart" is my only reason for writing. In moments of stirred emotion, in moments of worry, or in moments of sudden inspiration when something is just felt and falls into place, I'll use a few short lines to vent or record the state of mind. From the broken streams of consciousness in primary and middle school, to the fervent pursuit of parallelism, antithesis and rhyme in high school, then to the pursuit of plain and sincere expression in university, the style has indeed kept changing. It is at moments like these that one's restless inner self and tense, anxious feelings can gradually settle, that one can try to make a little peace with oneself, and ask oneself (or a sub-personality?) what one really thinks. And it is precisely at such moments that "I" am truly "myself", rather than that shadow living under the gaze of others.
I find myself zoning out from time to time. It isn't really that anything in particular is on my mind; I simply don't want to think about anything, just frittering time away pointlessly until the rest of the evening arrives. Rather than letting these snatched-away fragments of leisure go to waste, I might as well use them to record whatever I've recently learned, write a few technical posts, and consolidate my knowledge. Day after day I envy others for being so widely learned, but in truth all such learning is built up bit by bit. Without a beginning, how can there ever be a result? And going forward, don't keep doing meaningless things -- for example, when searching with Baidu, don't go clicking on the "News" sidebar. Before doing anything, think about cause and effect, think about expected costs and gains, so as not to act blindly. There are many ways to do any one thing; choose the most efficient one.