Also titled: "How I'd excused myself for binge-watching K-drama a whole week through"
It's 2 in the morning.
The room was immersed in darkness, and silence. My laptop, with its battery running at 15% and dying, gave off a faint light. The light hit my face, lit only a small part of it I imagine. My face must have been dark, greasy and covered in acne (I can still feel them burning as I wrote this). My back ached from sitting up for 12 hours straight. So did my legs. I had class the next day in the morning. My to-do list stayed as clean as it was first drawn. The sense of guilt grew bit by bit.
I was saved by the system low battery warning.
I then shut the laptop close and dragged myself up to my bed, with two things in my head: "Have Seo Eun-gi recovered from her memory loss or not?" and "God, I've got to start working!"
As how many other stories goes, the rest of that week went by the same pattern. And I went from being content with what then would seem to be a short break from my busy weeks to feeling ghastly satisfied with the guilty pleasure I enjoyed over the week. I ended up skipping the only two classes which I could have made it to and not finishing even a fifth of what I set out to do at the beginning of that week.
And as a fully self-responsible rational grown up, I naturally started the ritual of self-reflection. That's when the recurring yet perennially surprising realization hit me once again: binge-watching/reading/etc. may be merely a phase for others, but it is virtually a part of my life.
It all began during my last year in high school, the final haul before Gaokao. I was leading a monotonous, almost spartan life. The chunk of my daily routine was getting in and out of classes. Deciding to unplug myself to be fully-engaged (failed), I dropped all my old entertainments. But I was ironically quick to pick up the new alternative, i.e. net fictions, romantic net fictions to be specific. At first, it all went under control. I get a healthy dose of them each night before bed. After a while, I found myself compulsively reading into midnight to get through the irresistibly adorable, repeating plots. At the end of each page, I wanted some more, ever amused by what's coming next as much as I know what's coming next. Though following the same pattern, those "God! it's too cute!" moments always got me. I felt asleep every night with an adrenaline rush.
And eventually, I got into college and had more time of my own. And I felt no longer satisfied with just novels. I sought after anything that would get my heart pumping with adoration, from K-dramas to web series. So up until now, my life has been days when I was on a spree alternating with days when I temporarily walked out of the binge.
On and on, I started to come to term with my addiction to these unintellectually sweet stories. I came to realize that I'm an inveterate daydreamer with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for fantasies of love, romance, freedom, all problems being solved easily--all the perfect things that are only likely to exist in Disney fairytales.
Medically, we call this syndrome fangirling.
If the mechanism behind procrastination is a natural choice made my our brains of joy over pain, I guess fangirling is procrastination at its dreamiest. I see the world as a cold place where efforts should be made to get through a wave. It's neither magical nor rosy. So I abscond from it whenever I get the chance and hide in the world of K-dramas and net romances.
Thinking back to my childhood, I would wander by the roadside everyday and get lost in my imagination until my mom called me for dinner. A child is justified to have an imagination. But not so much for the adults. Adults are assumed to have grown out of the phase. But I believe that's not the truth.
A child daydreams to feel happy. That applies to everyone from every age. Everybody needs a buffer from the reality as much as everybody needs air to breathe and a heart that beats. Growing up, we may lose the naive but that we need a bit of sugar in our lives does not change, though everyone has their own prescription for that. Some travels, some makes travel plans, some reads, and some watch K-dramas!
Albeit different in the degree, we all yearn for something surreal to make our days a little bit easier. Binge-watching/reading are the habits that I can't wean myself off, as much as a faithful can't quit his religion and a drug-addict can't quit heroin.
Harsh enough is the reality to bear, why am I not justified to watch a few episodes of K-dramas to appease myself? Bite me!
Having thought of this, I resumed the final episode of Descendants of the Sun happily.