Deus ex Machina

Passing through unconscious states; when I awoke, I was on the highway.

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Random Stories

I am getting too used to free time these days. But there is no doubt that the pace of things is accelerating, and it will continue to do so until right before I leave for Christmas break. A lot of things are bothering me now - a lot of things unacknowledged, a lot of things unsaid. Still, I know I'm getting better.

Last weekend I bought a bottle of 'green' lemon-flavored tea and out of curiosity I checked the writing on the side, and there it was: the notice that said, 'Shake well before drinking.' It seems that on every bottle of processed drink/refreshment, that statement is plastered somewhere. I find it rather strange, because in most cases there isn't enough space to give the contents a good shaking and really, how can you expect to quantify a statement like 'shake well'? It might be a way companies use to cover for themselves, like if your drink tastes a bit funny and you complain, they could say, 'Well, maybe you didn't shake it well enough. See here - it says so on the label. So it's not really our fault.'

For some days now I've consistently awoken remembering strangely vivid dreams. And at least once I remember feeling afraid to fall asleep and become transported to that dream world where anything can happen. I'm fairly sure that incident was brought about by some of the stuff I've been reading - most likely a book called A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami which I recently finished. I'm now on my third book by this particular author, having read two others earlier this month in immediate succession. Mr. Murakami appears to always write in the first-person male point of view, and his narrators, and other characters from different books, share many similarities. His books probably give an accurate portrait of contemporary Japan, which I find interesting.

I remember when I was a kid, I watched this movie called Twice Upon A Time. It was partly animated, and it was about these creatures that came alive at night when everyone was asleep. One was a group of cute, bouncy, teardrop-shaped creatures - these were the good guys, and when they inhabited a sleeping person at night they caused pleasant dreams. Another group was of vicious-looking black crows that caused terrifying nightmares. These two groups competed with each other every night and whoever got to a sleeping human first would inhabit him the entire night. I was always afraid when the crows would come - they were nasty and they pushed the little teardrop guys around. I'm not sure how the movie ended though. I just know that I liked it, and that I felt a real fear the way only a child experiences, whenever I saw that fictional portrayal of evil. It was the same with the movie, The Wizard of Oz, whenever the Wicked Witch of the West showed up. I didn't like the creepy munchkins and those flying monkeys either.

Since I started sleeping with all the lights off whenever I'm alone in my room, I've noticed the peculiar function my blanket serves. With the lights all off and without anyone around, I feel vulnerable. My blanket gives me a sense of security.

I've had a long, peculiar history with blankets. As a child I was never comfortable with them. I thought them stuffy, heavy, and confining. I never learned to use them until I was maybe fourteen. I don't know what triggered things, but once I learned to sleep covered with a blanket, or a comforter, I couldn't sleep without one. And I remember that it was extremely important to me that both my feet were covered completely - I don't know why. For a long while, I was like that. Now, though, I have a more normal, functional relationship with my blanket. I usually sleep without it because of the heat, but I still use it in cold weather. And when I'm alone with all the lights turned off. But now, I don't mind when my feet stick out from underneath.

Monday, November 29, 2004

A Statement

Lately I've been spending most of my time mulling over life - its nature and its purpose. I've been trying to figure out what my existence means to me and what I expect of myself. I know that in these matters I'll never be able to get a solid, factual answer. But I think the most important thing for me is to never allow these questions to become far from my mind, because in the final analysis it might be the only thing that really matters.

Who am I and why am I here and what am I supposed to do? These are the questions that reduce every single person, regardless of race or culture or degree of learning - to the same level. Even a man brought up by animals, totally isolated from other people - whom the behavioral sciences would not even consider human, must find these questions extremely relevant and must already have worked out answers for himself.

Nothing else matters. Not the intellectual posturing, not money or social status or good manners or sex appeal. Everything else is extraneous. Perhaps, if I could name just one thing that I could have hoped to accomplished in all my time of existence, it would be that I lived keeping these questions close to my mind and heart and always attempting to find sincere answers to them. I do not want to lose my way again, because if I did and I died right after it, for me that would be the tragedy that I cannot allow myself to experience.

Monday, November 08, 2004

Here I Go Again

The second semester for Academic Year 04-05 officially starts tomorrow. Of course, I fully expect that nothing serious will happen yet, and that the real work will begin sometime next week. Besides, I only have to be in school for four and a half hours on Tuesdays, according to my schedule, but that might change once we get that missing subject which our class will have to follow up because of some mistake.

I am idle now, and if the way I handle schoolwork and my life here stays the same, which is probably what will happen, I will remain idle for the rest of the time before Christmas break when I shall once again fly back home, where I shall bum around more comfortably.

I am apathetic about most things right now, and the predominant thought on my mind is, Things don't make any sense. Don't ask me why - I won't be able to answer.

What I would like most to do, if things weren't so boringly predictable, is forget everything, start my life over, and become someone else. Not in the conventional sense, though. I'd still keep my physical self, except that my experiences, thoughts, and surroundings would be different, making me a completely different person. But this time, I would be happy.

A few days ago I had a curious experience. I had bought a pirated DVD of The Butterfly Effect and watched it with my dad. I had already seen the movie before and liked it a lot, but I thought it would be worth watching again, and I wanted to find out what my dad thought of it. In the middle of the movie, I noticed that there was a scene I did not recall seeing in the cinema. Several others followed, interspersed throughout the film, and I thought I was watching a special director's cut or something, with some deleted scenes included. But then, when the ending came, I was stunned. It was completely different. Apparently, they had used the facts established in the deleted scenes to lead to a different resolution.

They killed Evan, the main character. In the version I watched in the cinema, Evan had stayed alive, but other things turned out the same. Still, that had made all the difference. The makers of this movie had simply needed to add a few minutes of extra footage and alter around five minutes at the end to completely alter the story's conclusion, and to completely ruin it.

Had I watched that questionable DVD version at the cinemas, I would probably have not liked the movie at all. Although both versions were tragedies, the one where Evan lived was infinitely better. In the first place, the way Evan killed himself was completely lame. He went back to the time when his mom was about to give birth to him and refused to breathe or did something with his umbilical cord to make him die (Now that I think of it, pro-abortion people might even question whether unborn infants are actually capable of conscious thought). Then his mom shouted, "Not again!" or something like that because according to one deleted scene, she had suffered two miscarriages before Evan and he was now apparently the third. Another lame deleted-scene attempt at justifying the outcome was when a fortune teller who was examining Evan's palm suddenly looked at him with a faux-terrified look on her face and said something like "You have no lifeline! You were never meant to be!". Then the story fast-forwarded to the future, where everyone was happy because of Evan's non-existence, and ended with Kayleigh's wedding (Kayleigh was Evan's childhood friend and love interest).

I suppose the reason why I didn't want Evan to have to die is because that outcome would not have made possible his chance meeting with Kayleigh in some crowded city sidewalk. In that reality, they had never known each other. Evan looked over his shoulder after Kayleigh had passed him by (they were walking in opposite directions), which is understandable because he might have retained memories of everything that had happened - the movie wasn't very clear in that department. Interestingly, Evan didn't see that Kayleigh turned around after he did, probably prompted by some intuitive sense that they had met in some other life.

Afterwards, they both continued walking away from each other. All the while, the song Stop Crying Your Heart Out by Oasis was playing, and to me, that beautiful song lent a sense of indisputable finality and closure to the situation. It was moving and perfect and it showed that Evan had finally been able to let her go. You probably won't be able to understand this if you haven't watched the movie yet, and I apologize for the spoilers, but if you haven't seen The Butterfly Effect yet, I suggest you buy a copy (fake or otherwise) and watch it right away. And tell me what ending you see - I'm still puzzled why the movie exists in different versions.

Before I go, I should mention that I've joined NaNoWriMo, an event hosted every November. The challenge - to write a novel in at least 50,000 words in 30 days. Of course, I have only around two-thirds of the time left, I have probably never written a single piece containing more than a thousand words (the entire content of this blog only amounts to 20,000 or so words), I have never seriously considered writing fiction, and I have no I idea what to write, but what the heck. I'm not very mentally stable.

Wish me luck.