These are the things I could do without

---

Lily was never the perfect student. Sometimes traffic accidents and weather conditions would prevent her from reaching school, and dogs would occasionally eat her homework. She had made, as her New Year's resolution, a vow to try to be a good student, but today was harder than most. Her eyes closed for an extended blink once again.

She heard about the apiaceae and the convolvulvaceae, and it's not that she wasn't interested in the topic (botany was an elective for her after all), but she didn't sleep very well last night. Her roommates were partying hard and, being the responsible student that she was committed to being, she stayed in her room and tried to sleep.

With the energy she gained from the seconds long nap, she managed to prop open her eyes again. She decided to try different techniques to stay awake. The first method she tried was to survey her classmates. The girl in front of her was wearing a blue ribbon in her hair, and it looked good, despite her red hair. She seemed to be drawing bunnies in her notebook, and the only actual note she took so far was the date. Next, she stole a look at the guy beside her, hoping that he wasn't looking at the time and that if he was, he did not get the wrong idea. She just wanted to look at the man that smelled a bit like a dirty wet towel, and then never sit beside, or near, or in the same universe as him again.

The professor was a tall man and endearingly passionate about plants. Lily often pondered what his house is like – if it had vines snaking across all the walls and furniture, if it had every colour you could find in nature, and if it contained the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. He would probably feed it, Lily mused, but not for power or a girl, but because he couldn't let a plant die. She imagined him singing to it: “Please grow for meeeeee!”

There's a guy with indistinnct black...

When Lily regained her vision again, she was determined to keep it this time by singing songs in her head. The first one that came to mind was a slow ballad that she didn't know the name of, which was entirely her friend's fault for mislabelling the song when he gave it to her. Also, it was a very bad song to stay awake to. Blink.

Lily was startled to find herself as one of the only people in the classroom. It's like everyone had just vanished and were replaced with other students. I hate it when people are ridiculously early for their next class, she muttered, as she quickly packed up and gained a second wind going into her break.

---

This is my first attempt to get back into writing, so please forgive the poor quality. I wanted to do more with Lily's tendency to blame others for stuff.

I'm walking on sunshine

I don't exactly feel good. I feel like when God was handing out inspiring childhood tales, I somehow was not in line. Tonight at class everyone had pretty inspiring childhood stories, about how they came back to face their bullies, or how they were at the brink of teenage destruction but there was that one adult to bail them out.

I told a shitty, uninspiring story. It was one of two dead dad stories of the night. I couldn't think of a real lesson that I learned from my dad dying. The only effects I could really think of were bad: I don't have confidence in being a father myself, I hate relying on people's help, and the lack of a strong role model just made me try and mesh everyone's identities together to form my own. But of course I couldn't do that, so I thought about it the whole class (I was one of the last to present), and I realized that it did teach me something: that I was going to be different. Sure, plenty of Hong Kong people had immigrated, and plenty had dads still in Hong Kong working to support them, but how many of them were dead? None that I knew of. I wasn't afraid to do anything different after that. Resisting peer pressure was a breeze. I always made the smart choices, possibly because no one was there to rebel against. I've always done things differently or looked at things differently, and that is probably because of the lack of authoritative influence. I hated structured instruction even throughout university and preferred to learn on my own. And I've realized that it takes a lot out of me to try and identify a mentor.

I've always relied on the gang for moral outlook, or what's cool. But they weren't authorities. That makes me feel a bit better about fatherhood, about my potential as a father. I'm going to have a new way to raise my kid, and that's probably okay.