I need to cultivate my supapawa

There will be moments when I have entire posts planned in my head, even specific lines that get conjured up that beg to be written down -- but then, time moves on, and the plans and lines fade from my mind, losing their intensity. They missed their moment, and cannot be reproduced without them feeling fake.

Which is why, words are also time beings. Words are especially time beings. You've got to catch them when they form and grasp them tightly for transfer onto something more concrete, like paper, or video, or at least into someone's memory.

This story is intensely philosophical, moving, and made me cry unexpectedly; 

but written with the straightforwardness of a teenage girl.

It's the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.

Jiko felt like that when she learned that her only son was going to be killed in the war. I know, because I told her about the fish in my stomach and she said she knew exactly what I was talking about, and that she had a fish, too, for many years. In fact, she had lots of fishes, some that were small like sardines, some that were medium-sized like carp, and other ones that were as big as a bluefin tuna, but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki #1, and it was more like the size of a whale. She also said that after she became a nun and renounced the world, she learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away. I'm trying to learn how to do that, too.


At one point, Nao, the teenage girl, asked if only depressed people cared about philosophy. And that line made me even sadder, because when I get into one of these philosophical moods, I do feel extra sad, extra like-an-outsider, and thinking how, my God, I don't think I'm made for this world at all. Oh well -- Nabi s.a.w. did say that some of the best people are the ones who travel this world light, knowing that we're really not here for forever.

It's amazing my love affair with books: how they affect me, and leave major imprints on my heart, on my mind.




I've been remembering this thought, this memory: I remember going for a scholarship interview years and years ago, and nerdily mentioning Lymond, in relation to either books I love, characters I admire or citing leadership quality maybe -- can't quite recall. And then the Indian man who interviewed me said something about how this book must be really popular, the boy who was in just before you mentioned him too! At which of course, I almost got entirely derailed from the purpose of my being there (i.e. a job/scholarship interview) -- because Lymond? Popular? A boy reading it? Are you kidding me??? My eyes must have been almost rolling out of their sockets in shock. I think I insinuated to the interviewer that he must have been mistaken, but he was like, Really! And I was like, Okaaay...

I concluded by the end though, that the interviewer really must have been mistaken about Lymond -- there was no way it could be true. I could not find a single human being in my vicinity who was reading Lymond when I was, and I had to force my friends to read the books just so I could have people to discuss with! That was how desperate I was.

If it was true though, then: who is this boy! That's what I wanted to know. We would have had lots to discuss.