For You A Thousand Times Over

Nothing quite beats the kinda private sphere one can achieve by immersing oneself in a good book. By 'good book', I mean anything that, well, pretty much simply floats your boat. The requirements are entirely determined by you, the reader, the self-interpretation of which makes it all the more personal.

The Kite Runner turned out to be one such book for me. Some parts were really tear-jerker worthy and I guess I'm not afraid to admit I teared while reading it. Also because it's something I hadn't really had going for awhile. It's nice to be reminded of the salience of one's emotions, especially since I'm well aware of my strong state of rationality.

The part where Baba tells Amir that his marriage is the happiest day of his life, and hobbles off to perform one last fatherly duty. Meh.

You also rediscover what matters most to you when certain ideas cry, scream or sing out to your heart.



The Kite Runner touches on an array of issues from religious, Islamic philosophy to politics and gender equality, at the same time employing pretty good literary techniques to further enhance the symbolic nature of the central theme of redemption, and is not devoid of the good plot twist every now and then. It was, at times, really pleasant to read and, at others, thoroughly engaging.



Sometimes, when I read a part from a story and the scene gets painted vividly in my head in an almost realistic, movie-like fashion, I wonder if I get the mental visualisation because the writing is simply fantastic, or if it appears to me this way because the writing has been fashioned after the effect created by cinematics, or if I interpret it so because I've been conditioned, by watching movies, that imagery has a specific form to it.




Better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
- Khaled Hosseini

Audio Candy:
Stereophonics - Hurry Up And Wait

Wasted

It was only when I got out of bed and took my infant steps for the day that I realised I'd put myself through a battering for the soccer morning the day before. My glut-muscles (on my ass), groin muscles and muscles in all random areas of the body - right shoulder, left ab, lower back - ached with such an acute and annoying intensity that I felt it a chore just to do something as simple as walk.

I'd played right out of my skin that day. So much so that, I realised, we'd demolished the inadequate, unnecessary obstacles of the AJC teams with an urgent ease so as to move on to the 'ultimate malay team' and 'ultimate chinese team', so coined by Zhiquan and quite possibly his other soccer friends. And amazingly, we did away with the both of them too, one after another, before failing to rise to the challenge of the 2nd UMT (they had enough people to form 2 teams), but considering the impossibility of this eventual occurrence (of the winning streak since my team was quite an oddly assembled one to begin with) it was ridiculous enough to find yourself up against one ultimate team after the other, without the familiar respite of another random mediocre team in between, and even more ridiculously so to have had them booted out by your own doing.

Without a bigger challenge, I can sometimes labour to a hard-earned victory over the random, more mediocre teams present and on some occasions, even lose to them. If only I was stronger-willed with more consistency in the desire for victory and stay more focused. Adrenaline is a powerful drug indeed. It wasn't til I got home that I found huge bruises on my shins and calves and a bleeding left toe, preceding the muscle aches.

It's Kee's liberation day as her final paper ended this morning in bittersweet fashion, i.e. crappy paper but whogivesadamncositsover nonetheless. Poor girl hadn't slept the whole night; I was amazed at her ability to even last our date! It's the start of our holiday together and I've got ideas swirling in my head. Nothing heavy for the day, just some light shopping and food; an easy-going prelude to more interesting propositions.

I'm getting reinitiated into narrative writing by reading Life Of Pi now. The amount of descriptives in the novel is colossal to say the least and I was having trouble deciphering and imagining Yann Martell's lengthy and tedious written portrayals, of the boat especially. For the most part since my JC days, I've been reading more stuff that's angled towards opinions, facts and pretty much unnarrative stuff. At the moment it's quite passive reading, but credit to the author definitely for those descriptions I can vividly capture, as the writing is indeed beautiful. Just a pity that most of it is wasted on me.




Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.

Today's Listenables:
Waking Ashland - Hands On Deck

Reading has made me realise one rather sad thing. It hit me that very often, I can't visualise or simply see as vividly as how a scene is written in a book. "It was bright autumn and the hem of my raincoat where I sat brushed a nest of curling leaves, all shapes. The sky through the bare forked branches was very clear and there were good smells in the air: fern and a hint of blackberry." Once, I sprawled on a safari bed reading when I just sat up and tried to imagine myself taking in my surroundings in such literary fashion.

Maybe I'm disillusioned to think that I can take what the books say as a form of truth, not in a direct sense here but in a rather, more literal way. Either that, or I've lost my sense of imagination to actually capture each and every sentiment that flitters through the atmosphere that surrounds me. I believe these elements do tingle the senses, but my senses aren't keen enough to be enraptured by it all in the least bit, and they are quickly lost to oblivion; beautiful moments of time just thrown to the wind. In other words, I could be simply failing to appreciate what's around me.