Indulgence

almost the end of the sordid affair

Jhumpa Lahiri from The Third and Final Continent
I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

I cheated yesterday. I had 2 cigarettes. I was super cranky. I was like almost capable of being a super-hero except I had no cape or a mask nor would I have looked good in spandex but I definitely had raised crankiness to a super-human level yesterday. I didn't have to leap over tall buildings in a single bound because I could cause that building to crumble with but a glare. There would be no need to outrun speeding bullets since they would melt at the mere sound of my voice. If only I had but good intentions yesterday, I would have been able to effectively create world peace. But no, that was not to be.

Surprisingly, though, my tonsils have begun to shrink and are no longer causing me so much problems. I hope that this will be the last mention of that particular body part for some time. I have other body parts worth talking about in length. Let's just say, the tonsils were the last I expected to be talking about at length... Well, those and the spleen which I really don't know what it's for. Let's just say that Bactidol really saved the day. Without the use of a doctor or any form of anti-biotic, Bactidol, being the only medicinal ritual I kept and now, my body and the red fluid I gargled ceremoniously twice a day has cured me of the problems that were plaguing me for the past few days.

Of course, I still want to have them removed but I would be harder pressed to think up of a good argument for my doctor who would probably look at me and just laugh. So it looks like my next medical emergency would be my impacted wisdom teeth.

There is always something to over-dramatize, isn't there? I have learned from history that you can overly problematize nothing and that long periods of time without over-exagerating something is boring. Either that, or I'm a drama-queen on speed. Laugh, it was meant to be funny

I finished Interpreter of Maladies and I enjoyed it thoroughly. In the weekend, I am hoping to read the Steven Pressfield book regarding the Amazons. From cultural to historical. Not a bad idea, I'm guessing. Lately, I've just been throwing myself at Literature and it's making for fantastic escapes for me. I remember how I was before; a wide-eyed Literature major hoping to make it big as a novelist with an international reading audience. The goal before was not an Oscar or a Cannes but a Pulitzer, a Booker Prize and eventually the Nobel. I remember imagining that my life was going to be very social except for a span of 2 or 3 months where I would be a recluse to write my next amazing novel. Yeah, I was ambitious and delusional since I was very young...

I can feel a resurgence of that old feeling -- like I want to take time off to write and write and write. All of a sudden, the pangs of wanting to direct are leaving me for a bit and I want to focus everything to my writing again, like before.

I cheated today as well. I had one and a half cigarettes. If I could maintain a 2 cigarette a day thing, I might be able to help myself out of the habit. Who are you kidding, you bleeding fucking weakling! You're weak... you're so fucking weak! And then, maybe I'll never have respiratory problems again.

Oh yeah, by the way, I've been having really, really strange dreams. Very real and very close to reality. I would wake up and think that it would be the next day because I would dream that I did everything I had to do for that day. The feeling would be really, really jarring -- like walking through glass and not knowing it was there. That's what it feels like, to have your reality just suddenly taken away from you. I would dream that I was having these long conversations with someone on the phone through text and I would wake up and discover that I read one message in the middle of the night and that one message was true and everything else we talked about was false -- never really happened. I dreamt that I was working with someone I never met yet and it was horribly tiring but I had to keep reminding myself it was what I wanted. I dreamt that a package arrived from abroad and that my brother and I were fighting over who got the right to open it. Things like that -- very real and so very disorienting when you discover that it never happened.

*sigh*

posted by wanggo @ 7:15 PM