Be No.12 - An avocado plant in our office and a retired electric thermos (2021)

Sensibility: One of my colleagues has family who farm avocados, and every harvest season she brings in a big box for everyone to blend into juice. Other coworkers took the leftover seeds and started growing them as office plants. They take a long time to sprout from soaking, but the success rate is surprisingly decent — and now the windowsill is lush with green.

Rationality: Formula for infants is supposed to be mixed with water at 70°C, but not every electric thermos has a 70°C setting. Getting a child to drink “properly” prepared milk turns out to be no small feat. Though there's always that quiet voice in the back of my head: does it really matter what temperature the water is? Kids grow up just fine either way, don't they?

Be No.11 - A leaf in our apartment complex and a NAS device in our office (2021)

Sensibility: Our apartment complex has a small gym, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've used it since we moved in. Without some kind of external pressure holding you accountable, it's genuinely hard to keep up any exercise routine.

Rationality: Should we go with a 2-bay NAS or a 5-bay? Should the server live at the office or in the cloud? At work, we're usually expected to give clear reasons for the trade-offs we make. But when it comes to personal decisions, we often can't even explain our own choices to ourselves.

Be No.10 - A snail shell found in our apartment complex and the networking cables in our office (2021)

Sensibility: Kids seem to love watching snails, and my son is no exception. I find myself wondering — for adults, is staring at such a slow-moving creature a form of therapy, or a form of torture?

Rationality: The server room at our office still has the network cabling left behind by the previous tenant. The sheer volume of wires is enough to make your head spin. I have nothing but deep admiration for whoever designed and managed all of that — they must have a patience far beyond the ordinary.

Be No.9 - An egg of my breakfast and a retired electric fan (2020)

Sensibility: I'm hopeless in the kitchen. All I can make is fried eggs and boiled dumplings. But honestly, I chose to be this way — starting from scratch felt like way too much work.

Rationality: I'm not usually someone who runs hot. Back in the day I could sleep through summer nights without turning on the air conditioning. But these past few years, I just can't seem to manage it anymore. I'm not sure if the world has changed, or if I have.

Be No.8 - A seed pod picked by my son and my wife's hard disk (2020)

Sensibility: Someone once said that instead of buying your child gifts, you should take them on trips. That resonates with me deeply — because gifts will eventually face the dilemma of whether to keep or throw away, while a trip or a good meal never comes with that problem.

Rationality: I remember helping my dad install software as a kid, which meant working through a whole stack of large floppy disks, feeding them into the drive one by one in order. It was quite the production.

Be No.7 - A pine cone gifted by a friend and my electric bass (2020)

Sensibility: An old classmate who collects LEGO told me that a lot of today's pieces are designed to represent only one specific thing, unlike the LEGO of the past, where the same mold could become something completely different depending on the scene — a flashlight-shaped piece used on a camper van, for instance, could become a stabilizing leg. That's the kind of LEGO that actually sparks imagination.

Rationality: This electric bass I bought in my first year of university is Made in West Germany — a witness to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, it never quite adapted to life in Taiwan, and without proper care, the neck warped badly. Even so, I love its sound and find it hard to let go.

Be No.6 - A leaf of my succulent plant and an HDMI adapter in our office (2020)

Sensibility: A row of Kalanchoe laetivirens planted in mugs along the windowsill — the breakfast auntie at a hotel once enthusiastically snipped a few offshoots for us to take home. When we planted them, we were amazed: they refuse to die even without watering, and they spread like wildfire.

Rationality: The HDMI adapter in our office meeting room has been used so much that its casing has fallen off, yet it keeps soldiering on. Adapters really are a kind of vessel that transcends time.

Be No.5 - A leaf found during a trip and my Canon film camera (2020)

Sensibility: An old friend of mine is about to become a father. Knowing full well how hard raising a child can be, he felt anxious — and so he decided to shut down some of his more time-consuming, low-yield ventures. Somehow, that's when things financially started to flow more smoothly. I've come to feel the same way: having a child gave me the opportunity to learn how to make real trade-offs.

Rationality: I bought this Canon A1 online for a good price — it had a minor fault, but a little sewing machine oil was all it needed to fix it. A while back, the light meter stopped working and I sent it in for repair. Fortunately, replacing the part brought it back to life. Old cameras like this tend to have their quirks, but they're tough in the long run.

Be No.4 - A cicada found in my balcony and my enlarger timer (2020)

Sensibility: I took my one-year-old son out to water the plants on the balcony and found a dried-up cicada, completely intact. I didn't know how to tell him what it was, or how to explain what had happened to it. I quietly dropped it into a trash bag, but if felt like a shame to just throw it away.

Rationality: I only recently discovered that my enlarger timer had been running inaccurate all along — which explains why prints made with the same settings kept coming out differently. I had gone through every other part of the darkroom process looking for the culprit. The timer was the one thing I never thought to question.

Be No.3 - A fallen leaf from a street tree and my broken Pentax camera (2020)

Sensibility: I took my son to meet up with friends at a restaurant, and accidentally brought home one of the restaurant's children's books along with the one a friend had gifted us. My son loved that book. Paper books usually end up needing tape within moments of being in his hands — but this time, we made a real effort to return it to the restaurant intact. It made it back with only a few extra creases.

Rationality: I once found this fully functional Pentax compact at a secondhand shop. It wasn't a steal, but it satisfied the joy of treasure hunting, and it stayed with me for quite some time. Recently, its film advance mechanism broke down, and it can no longer shoot. Getting it repaired probably isn't worth it. I haven't figured out how to say goodbye to it yet.

Be No.2 - A fallen leaf from the park and my enlarger timer fixed by my father (2020)

Sensibility: I took my son to the park, and he loves picking up leaves from the ground and stuffing them into drain covers or any hole he can find. I wonder if he just finds it fun to make things disappear.

Rationality: Several years ago, during a home renovation, I moved my enlarger outside temporarily and covered it with a raincoat. After the renovation was done, I found the wooden base had rotted and the timer was coated in hardened cement — completely unusable. My father made a new base for me and got the timer working again. If the same thing happened between my son and me someday, I'd probably just give up and buy him a brand new one.

Be No.1 - A leaf from my unkillable Golden Pothos and a retired wireless AP (2020)

Sensibility: I'm a plant killer. Most of the potted plants I've cared for over the years haven't survived past a year. This golden pothos is one of the earliest plants I ever grew, and somehow it's still alive today. There were several times it looked like it was on the verge of dying from neglect, but every time I watered it, it would come back. I'm genuinely grateful for it — it makes me feel like I'm not completely hopeless in this department.

Rationality: A while back, the internet at home kept getting slower and slower. I finally called a technician, and the engineer told me that the 2.4G band had become too congested over the years due to the sheer number of devices using it, causing serious interference. He recommended switching to an AP that supports the 5G band. And so, this old 2.4G-only AP was knocked out of the game.