It’s been quite awhile since I’ve updated, but that’s because at least I could try and admix with my posts on my anime blog most of the things that occur in my life. I don’t think I could do so with this post, especially because it concerns too little with anime and too much with my own personal life. I write because I want to, but I also write because it relieves stress. I am heavily stressed right now, so I shall write.

My father always tells me to aim for the stars. Aim not for the treetops, he says, for if one falls one falls to the ground. Figuratively, this means that one should aim for excellence and strive for perfection. It also means that when one falls short, at least he isn’t in trouble of failure.

I’ve thought of a riposte to this: when one falls from the stars, he will most definitely die – without any exception. Even just falling from an airplane will assure certain death; falling from the stars is just stupid. Yet falling from the treetops, especially from low trees, may be at worst fatal, but at best be only shallow wounds or lacerations. This has been my mindset from the start of second year, and it hasn’t changed, even with the words or verbal back-patting my parents give me. They say that I am able to do anything I desire, because I am smart (or so they say), but right now I’ve failed in a quite a few subjects. They say I’m smart, but my grades are just atrocious.

I’d like to think that it may be because I dislike (or to use a harsher term, despise) my course, and it may be such, only that I don’t want to admit it. I never, though, have wanted to be a doctor, and I had my doubts with my course the very first day I entered it. I was never born or made to be a person who loved memorizing by rote all the different names in Biology; I (once) excelled in English, Literature, and Physics – all subjects not requiring formulaic memorization but in-depth, vivisecting analyses of interwoven topics. But that may just be an excuse. For one, I’m also lazy, not having the taste in the subjects I desire to have – to the extent of sleeping the day before the exam without any intention of even trying to rectify a situation where nothing has entered into the brain at all.

But I guess I’m just full of excuses. I can’t even think I’m smart right now with all the failure abounding and surrounding me. I love living, however. I love living to think and thinking to live; that doesn’t happen much in my course, though. So I’m thinking, even after two years … I may need to go somewhere else.

God, I’m one lonely bastard. I hope my incoherence is understandable.

I’ve culled this entry from three entries of my anime blog – this is somewhat the evolution of what I’ve read these past few days. It starts with a short write-up on A Time to Speak and basically is an evolution of the books I’ve read from subpar, propangandist literature, to some good, classical ones.

Instead of continuing with Snow Falling on Cedars, I decided to start (and just recently finished) another book entitled A Time to Speak by Edward St John. Since I bought it out of impulse (i.e. I bought it because the cover page of the book was aesthetically appealing to me), I read through it as quickly as I could – I knew that the content of the book wasn’t as voluble or visceral as the classics that I often read – and I was correct in this assumption.

It was a decent book. It somewhat hinted to me the political climate of Australia in the late 1960s (which was tumultuous), and narrated notable historic occurrences of that time (an example would be the sinking of HMAS Voyager, or the development of the F-111). However, as I saw it, it was mainly propagandist material and the author’s defense of himself. The book, as well as the topic St John discussed was temporal and topical: from the perspective of a young adult in the year 2006, his novel was self-centered, shallow, banal and basically worthless – though I must say, I learned quite a few things from that narrative of his. I learned new words like shibboleth, percipient, contumely, animadversions, etc. It was somewhat a quasi-historical document, so I was somewhat partly informed about Australia’s history. Ultimately, however, the author seemed full of himself (this ‘virtue’ is needed when one desires to win an election or be a politician), but it was good to know who the PM of Australia was at that time: when someone asks me (most probably tangentially) who the PM of Australia was in 1969, I could say that it was John Gorton.

It is a book I wouldn’t recommend unless one is an Australian OR immensely interested in its history; even Microsoft Encarta (the popular electronic encylopedia) didn’t have any articles on Mr. Gorton or Mr. St John, or of the multitude of names that he had mentioned in that book. I do thoroughly suggest reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, however – now that was a great book.

* * *

I guess that despite shooting all that flak towards A Time to Speak the novel had more of an effect on me than I liked to admit. I did not feel warm or fuzzy, however; nor did I feel awed or inspired with the book despite the author’s mastery of the English language. (Can you use shibboleth in a sentence without consulting a dictionary? That word alone was enough to wow me.) On the contrary, the novel’s aftertaste seemed like a partaking of a most unguent and sialoid gumbo without water to aid one in swallowing it. Swallowing a bitter almond with water may have been an easier task. (Never mind that it may be poison )

The aftertaste felt quite abhorrent that even water in the analogy fails to remove it (a decent or above average novel). Right now, I need some panacea, some elixir that altogether decimates that bad taste left in my mouth – that narrative or novel is simply that horrible in my opinion. Water simply cannot cure a strong poison: one needs a strong antidote. To exacerbate this disgust that I have right now, I read For Whom the Bell Tolls before reading A Time to Speak. This is akin to riding a rickety and rusting Ford pick-up of the 1950s after riding a 2006 Jaguar or a Ferrari. The rift is that vast, that immense, that elephantine – and I quickly need something to counteract this necrosis that’s occurring in my mind. It’s because For Whom the Bell Tolls was arguably Hemingway’s greatest work, while A Time to Speak is simply some selfish defense of the author’s acts in parliament. The former is a timeless and beautifully tragic character study of people who live in constant danger and trouble through their lives, while the latter is some propaganda (not a bad one at that), but something selfish and self-centered. I did learn about Australian history, however, so it’s not the worst novel I’ve read (I guess).

This disgust is slowly becoming an unstoppable juggernaut within my soul. Even I declined reading The Moon is Down today, arguably among Mr. Steinbeck’s better (if not best) works.

* * *

I’ve finally done a pogrom against hackneyed literature with the reading of Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down. His literature is not as terse or brief as Hemingway’s or as serpentine or long-winded as Faulkner’s, but I would argue that he’s among the best writers (American or not) of short novels (and novels at that), even better than the names I’ve mentioned above. Though The Moon is Down isn’t as good a novel as Of Mice and Men, I’d say it still ranks well among the world’s classics. One can break a man’s heart; one can destroy everything important to that said man; but one can never break another man’s spirit – a man can be imposed on, but he can never be conquered unless he chooses to be. Although The Moon is Down was originally written to be a propagandist novel, I’d say it transcended that purpose and presented something more universal which are (from what I perceive) the ideas I’ve noted above. Having said that, I’m thankful that I’ve somewhat regained the sapor in reading that I temporarily lost with A Time to Speak.

I’m still plodding on with Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars (I’m often quite condescending when it comes to contemporary novels), and I’ve bought Yevtushenko’s Selected Poems, who wrote ‘Babi Yar,’ a poem, that somewhat subliminally impressed itself on my mind – I thus felt that I had to procure the book even without knowing who Yevtushenko was. I guess my guess was on-the-mark, because he did write good poems, and he had an entry in Microsoft Encarta which I gave importance to: only important people or people who have shaken the world are often included in encyclopedias, electronic or not.

Since I really have no one to turn to in real life (and I most certainly have no plans of ending my life prematurely), I’m just writing to try and dissipate all the headache and problems life brings me right now. By the way, I can’t turn to my parents because my parents (at least my dad) is a source of the predicament I am in right now – he’s the one who wants me to be in a course I’m not really good at or care much about, and it is a failed dream of his that became the phantasm that haunts me in my daily life. He’s the one who wants me to be a doctor, and I’ve remained indecisive until it was too late because I was ingenuously afraid that I would kill him if I shifted to a course that I liked. Now it’s too late, and I have no one to talk things over to – my friends have their own problems, perhaps worse than mine, so I’m talking to this blog and whoever reads it – most probably no one.

Since people have complained about writing my misgivings on life and living in general with my anime blog, I’ve made a new one all my own that deals with my own problems. Though it probably won’t get the readership that my anime blog has (and that has only a few, I guess), I think it’s better and healing for me to pour my heart out instead of keeping it to myself. I’m a good keeper of secrets but not of vitriolic feelings.

What’s worse is that no one has even cared to comment on a post I’ve made that I’ve given a lot of effort in writing except a countryman of mine who may have had more pity than genuine desire to comment on that post. I’m not a comment whore despite what some people say, though I would appreciate if people read my posts and commented on it, most especially on those posts that I’ve poured my heart into – those two posts before my most recent one. Well, there are just some days like this where nothing goes well. To exacerbate these stacking predicaments of mine, I had a D with a subject, and a grade average that’s very low (to my parents and peers) because people think I’m a fucking genius. (I say this with no intent of malice or insolence: it’s just what I feel and think.)

Although anime in my life is something inextricable and something admixed with my psyche, these problems that plague me right now are in my opinion just too much that I can’t even write anything about one of my favorite media.

That’s all for now – if you’ve read up to here, thank you very much.