classes are interesting, my workload is light, and yet a seemingly unescapable malaise of anxiety has settled over everything. i'm being careful about drinking coffee, i've let myself give up kendo for the semester, and i'm seeing my friends often enough. should i be drawing more? reading more? the rhythm of my life seems perfectly reasonable (i've even gotten into the most consistent exercise routine i've ever had) and yet i feel like i'm driving myself into a corner. i don't know what i'm trying to escape.
"the multitude of garments michele had changed in and out of lay scattered around him, resembling leaves or petals swept away by the wind. ain gathered them in his arms, as if he were picking up dead foliage" - the taming
january is a month with only thirty days to me. whatever. since i've gotten back to school, the skin around the knuckles on my right hand has been really dry, which is new.
dining hall grill cook asked me if i'd like his copy of forbidden colors, which i readily agreed to. he says he'll also give me his mishima: a life in four chapters dvd when i graduate in two years.
since it's too cold for my usual wandering, i spend more time leaned up against the heater, reading books (yourcenar or pamuk or more mishima) or wikipedia articles (general semantics, linguistic relativity) or rewatching youtube videos i've downloaded onto my phone (mariam much's practicing 24 hours a day). the ideas seem to just flow over me, not sticking at all, but i'm hoping that they're being saved somewhere for a later time.
classes continue on in their fashion. having great fun reading about soil for my imperial china class, which makes me miss my farm job. haven't drawn in too long, but i think i've finally settled (after two years) on the proper dynamic between wilkes and pethor.
speaking of two years ago, i've somehow become once again involved in arbitrating the relationship between a taiwanese girl i never actually met and one of my fellow exchange students who i haven't actually talked to in over a year, but the girl still texts me for advice despite my various attempts to tell her that i don't think the guy in question is at all interested in a romantic relationship.
it's my week to pick out the movie my friend group will watch and i think i've decided on mad max: fury road because i'm not sure if furiousa will be interesting to them without any background context? i'd like to watch a derek jarman film but i think i have to ease them into that first.
"to be able to advance much in perfection, it is necessary to apply ourselves to one thing by itself--to a single book of devotion, to a single spiritual exercise, to a single aspiration, to a single virtue..." - a year with the saints, jan 28
snow "storm" came and went. we got monday morning off class, except i had no classes monday morning since my lab section doesn't start until next week. i did go sledding on cardboard with some friends late sunday night which was quite fun, and the walk back up the hill kept me warm enough despite the lack of a proper winter coat (two sweaters and a wool blazer work fine in most cases, it turns out).
progress on classwork is slow and i have trouble convincing myself to start. putting toasted corn in my corn grits tastes very good. various thoughts on the current book i'm reading but i'll save that for when i'm done with it (probably tomorrow, at this rate).
"to achieve a fully religious ethic we must completely give up the notion of life after death, and also completely give up the notion of death after life" - solar ethics, pg 14
classes are nice so far, i'm somehow back to mostly intro classes and the history department seems mysteriously allergic to assigning papers these days so my workload for this semester seems quite light. taking my first computer science class and i have to wait seven weeks before we get to anything new to me but i like the professor a lot. my astronomy professor has a very nice german accent even if he likes to hit the board with a wooden rod a lot.
went to a performance of the biber mystery sonatas last night with some friends and it was soooo good! they only did a few of the sonatas but between each piece they had some improv synth stuff that was also fire. also, one of the baroque violins was a former latin classmate of mine (did not say hi).
my major stressor in life is kendo... i shouldn't have bought armor because i don't want to keep doing it... but i did buy armor so i need to go to at least a few practices to not feel completely awful about wasting money... let this be a lesson to my future self about being more insistent on saying no.
mad max 2015-2018 fandom save me... been spending too much time looking through old tumblr blogs but i have the outlines of the internship essays done, at least. the weather is not too cold but not warm enough and my fingers are always freezing inside the house.
"no nation of men can mantain for any long period of time the achievement level that they have reached, when a sizable majority of them are walking only on concrete and asphalt--people to whom october is just a word on a calendar"
- rural life in the hudson valley, pg 228
the media log (?) to our right is not the entire list of books/movies that i've witnessed this year, by the way. i'm keeping a list with comments on all of them, but i'm sparing you guys some of the more boring action movies so that the things i think are more important to my person have more space. we'll see how i feel about this system next year.
this is my weekend of concerts, it seems. last night, i went to a classical guitar concert at the local library with my father and fear i have found my new favorite style of music. i'm used to my sister's cello playing (saw her perform with her orchestra tonight, and will see her and my other sister with their school tomorrow night), which weaves its way around you. the guitar, though, washes over you like waves. it was very nice.
i've been watching a lot of werner herzog films with my father recently. whenever i'm home, we like to watch movies almost daily, and the ones he picks usually end up either being life changing stories or the worst pieces of cinema ever made. rarely do they fall anywhere in between.
a good part of my life (usually the most enjoyable part, too) centers around reading or watching other people's stories. i suppose at some point i should get serious about telling my own, but i have various problems with my own creative output right now. the box of stories i've been slowly chipping away at all feel too childish. actually, i think they're all perfectly capable of being mature, it's just the parts that i've focused on and feel comfortable bringing out of my head into the real world that feel childish. another thing to add onto the list of things i'm scared of.
"he realized in that instant, with a clarity that caved his chest in, that he'd missed out because of his own inhibition. he'd been so worked up about getting it right that, in the end, he didn't get it at all"
- the heretic's guide to homecoming, pg 224
walking to church in the early morning, the fresh layer of snow melts into the candy colored dawn. looking at the astronomy internships i picked out months ago and thinking about how all i want to do is garden and wash dishes and read books.
new page, featuring my neighbor's backyard. maybe i'll get bored of it by summer and switch it out for a new photo, but we'll see. there are some other boxes that will appear once i have stuff to put in them, but i've hidden them for now since they'll look weird empty.
idli and uttapam are the ideal winter breakfast. the batter almost looks like snow, but it warms you up and keeps you full till lunch. i need to learn to cook more indian food from my mother before i move out...
these days are spent trying to 100% the mad max video game, trying to read the original chinese version of kevin chen's ghost town, and trying to completely clear the driveway of snow. lots of trying.
"the morning sky there was brilliant with a pure light that washed everything clean, from the weariest faces to the very mud in the ruts"
- the heirs of the kingdom, pg 325
i vaguely feel like i've read this before but i didn't remember the plot at all so who knows. it was fine. the pacing on the sequel felt a bit more annoying, but i enjoyed the father because he felt rather seafort-ish.
third time watching this movie, still love it. the last movie i made my friends watch was met with mixed reviews and actually this one was too, but one of them reallly liked it so i'm happy. there's a lot of things i enjoy even more now that i've played the game and read more of the comics too. making them watch furiousa next but eventually i gotta rewatch the first three movies as well.
i read the third book in this series two years ago and enjoyed it greatly despite a few weird lines. after finally reading the beginning of this series, i have learned that the third book was perhaps the only normal book in the series. the author can clearly write compelling stories and even by the end of the book when i desperately wanted to just give up on finishing it at all, he does some interesting things. that said, i am very very glad i have only scavenged the volumes i own from second hand book stores and have never contributed to any form of monetary support for the author.
forced into watching this by a university friend who did not explain the plot well to me. the recording we watched was not very high quality but i did not like any of the songs... i'm too picky with musicals... also, our mutual friend who is supposed to be focusing on seafort is now obsessed with uwe kröger because of it.
i liked this one a lot in the way that i like stories with awful protagonists. top 5 ways that change is necessary to grow as a person. wait, wasn't that the same guy from being john malkovich?
it was fine. i feel like both victor and the creature were a bit more black and white than in the book but i also haven't read the book since highschool. never been a big toro fan and i am still unconvinced.
recommended to me by a college friend. would not have picked it out on my own, but i enjoyed it decently and probably would have enjoyed it even more if i was in middle school. this is kind of like if you mixed the feintuch protagonist with little tree and put him in an forested post-apocalypse setting.
i was probably going to watch this eventually, but it got moved up on my list because the grill cook at my favorite college cafeteria recommended it to me. i haven't actually read any of the stories directly referenced and it took me a little while to separate them from his life itself, which i think was mostly the point.
not the pinnacle of the crime/horror genre but i agree heavily on principle. apparently based on a japanese novel and was previously adapted into a japanese film (this one is korean) so i'm a little interested in seeing how the two adaptation compare.
solid, quite in depth and discusses various topics with small anecdotes in a straightforward (if somewhat bland) fashion. if you're interested in late 19th century/early 20th century farm life in the eastern u.s. this is definitely a good one!
i guess we count video games here too. still playing because i want to get as close to 100% as i can but i'm finally done with the storyline after... nearly a year? i don't play that often and usually just like to do the side quests/gather materials. thought i would dislike the story more than i did: ending was fucked up but that's the point so whatever. i would also be mad if all that happened to me.
usually the free book cart at the library is disappointing at best, but this book was good enough that i'm going to have to buy the next book so i can own both of them. my last several forays into the fantasy genre have been disappointments and while i could easily see myself disliking this book under different circumstances, the main character is (unfortunately) literally me.
as part of a bigger worldbuilding project and a story that is greatly concerned with stories itself, i spent a lot of time thinking about the language used to represent this foreign planet. the main species are "humans," and they have "lobsters" and "cloves" and "cinnamon." their geography and history is different from ours, and yet they are the same. "if you look close enough, everything is constant--and if you look from far enough away, too. it is only in the medium between that everything appears to change."
the first half of the story is spent in the company of storytellers and we are told many stories in their presence. after we leave them, there is only one final tale, told near the very end of the book, which is completely different than the earlier fables. at first, this difference disturbed me, but i think that's the point. the truth is not the same as entertainment. how can we continue to tell history?
i was looking forward to this one, but i found myself liking it less than fata morgana. too many helicopter flyovers in the first half; the narration felt more like an obstacle to appreciating the story told by the images than something that added to them.
my favorite of the (admittedly limited number of) herzog films i've watched thus far. may have fallen asleep for part of it but i think that added to the mood of the film. stunning.
book i found in a small second hand book store in new mexico two years ago during a road trip. the way oldenbourg writes about the poor weavers of arras draws you in and dashes all your hopes and dreams on the rock wall of jerusalem. i'll miss you saint-john. only thing i can nitpick is the very last part with marie, which felt rather useless and gratuitous.
this was a surprisingly beautiful movie, definitely going in (the latter half of) my top 10. the title sums up the film pretty well: what if you could be john malkovich? i looove lotte.
sci-fi yuri manga about catching fish. heavier on the fishing and society they lived in than the yuri but i liked it a lot. was looking forward to the explanation for why they always dressed up but did not get one.