it's been a long time since i last blogged, it seems. i'm increasingly having less time to do anything other than my readings or stuff related to that, and sleep is getting hard to come by! i'm out a lot, travelling a lot, on the phone quite a lot - which leaves me little time to do my own things at home besides keeping up with my readings.

i just watched Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August for a Japanese film module just now. Tuesdays are my film-watching days since i have such a long break from the 8am lecture till the 4pm one. it's rather thought-provoking and it's left me with a lot of thoughts in my head about the way the film was edited and shot. i do think i'm not quite the film critic, i haven't the predisposition nor the eye for that sort of artistic beauty. but i am able to tell when the director is trying to bring across a certain message through his shots, camera angle, editing process, background music, things like that. and when i can tell, i can appreciate and think about what he's trying to tell me, us.

these days, i seem to think about my world in articles. i look at everything around me and live through them, all the while thinking about whether whatever's happening to me would make a good article and how i'd develop it further. after watching the films, i'm also slowly starting to think of my world in through a movie. i wonder at how my life would be depicted on screen, how those times i lived through and felt so keenly would be shown on a film. the pain - how would it be brought across to do the actual feeling justice? the happiness - how would it be told to the audience so they can feel my euphoria?

my mind's whirring through a million and one things these days. so calm on the surface but so many things going on inside, still. not entirely bad to be thinking though! there're the whitish good thoughts, and then there're the blackish bad thoughts. and then, there're those greyer ones that're neither good nor bad, just thoughts. i've realised that i'm still completely unable to sit through the entire memory of the last 2 years in one sitting and not flinch. in fact, tears still prickle my eyes every single time i happen to recount in my head. i hate it when the prickly tears turn into trickles down my cheeks. that's when i feel like i'm really crying - and that just means that the past isn't really the past yet, right? when i remember, it just feels as though i'm reliving everything again and the stabbing hurt from the incident/instances still stabs as hard now, many months later.

when does the past cross over through time somehow, reach out its hands through the silken threads of time and space, and grip me here and now to replace my present with the shuddering, hurtful ghosts the Past contains? how does it? is it cos i let the Past cross this threshold of dimension and time? or does it manage to do it, regardless of whether or not i do anything to 'let it'?

my reality now becomes my past every now and then and i get so lost in the moment that i feel every sensation as keenly as if i were living then right here right now. this is so dejavu-ish! i had this same thing in j2, when the littlest things would trigger bittersweet (in every sense of the word) memories and force me to relive them in my mind. same thing now, my reliving of whatever past i have can't be fast-forwarded or muted - everything is as it was and i have to live through the agonisingly sweet and familiar and maddeningly normal scenes as though i were going through it now. on one hand, i don't want to pull myself out of those memories because as they were then, they weren't painful. they were pleasant, more than pleasant. i felt safe. but the maddening thing is that as i relive those scenes in my head as though they were happening to me now, i am also living with the knowledge i have now that i didn't have then - that they wouldn't last at all and that a couple of months down, i'd be mired in self-pity, hatred, frustration, and so many other things that i can't even begin to list them down. it's like being cursed with the gift of foresight and you can see how your loved ones die one by one and still have to look at them in the now with the same eyes.

i'm afraid to think that anything will last, now. everything seems so transient! no wonder people need tangible signs of love, care, concern, commitment etc. those intangibles which mean a whole lot more don't count for anything when you're striding the line between what was and what is to come.