chinese tv stations are just getting worse and worse. i couldn't seem to find anything worth watching all day long. so today i was flipping channels forever as usual, until i stop at this weird taiwanese tv series called the eighth pawn shop.

it is about an imaginary pawn shop to which customers could pawn any possession including tangible things such as a leg and intangible things such as talent, soul, love. for an example, in the show, a mother pawned her love for the child for the success in fashion. the grown up child, agonizing over the lack of maternal care, in turn pawned her talent in fashion design for her mother's love. then, the guilty mother pawned her eyes to take back the child's talent. things like that. you get the point.

it is a very strange concept. almost shocking at first. can we really rank the things in our lives and decide which we could lose indefinitely in order to gain the other? can we really say, i don't want the love, i just want my career, and here, you can have my love, please give me a high flying career? how could we make any of these choices when we don't really know what is to come, and from which we are to gain more? it's tempting to think, if i were to go to such a pawn shop, what would i pawn for what? and i shudder as if it was such a terrible thing.

but a little more thought reveals that it is nothing new. we are defining priorities all the time. we are disgarding some things over others every time we make a choice. ordinary choices such as spending the night at the laboratory or a nightclub and whether or not to take our eyes off the computer monitor to pay more attention to our naggy moms. the pawn shop owner just lets his customers do it a more calculative, explicit and irreversible way. we in reality, might not even weigh things as carefully. we just go ahead and decide. on what basis are we making these decisions?

what would you pawn, and for what, my friend, if the 8th pawn shop really existed?