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.