a series of fortunate events?

xD hahahaha. the back of my head is sooo hot!

slacking.
take me away from the empty place and show me where the heart is
moooooooooooooooooooo

5.

Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? maybe something like: This is no place for me.

This occurs to me while I'm riding the Yamanote Line. I'm standing by the door, holding on to my ticket so I won't lose it, gazing out the window at the buildings we pass. Our city, these streets, I don't know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. The dirty façades, the nameless gray skies, the billboards on every square centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement. An infinity, and at the same times, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That's the city. That's when I remember what that Chinese girl said.

This was never any place I was meant to be.

I look at Tokyo and I think China.

That's how I've met my share of Chinese. I've read dozens of books on China, everything from the Annals to Red Star over China. I've wanted to find out as much about China as I could. But that China is only my China. Not any China I can read about. It's the China that sends messages just to me. It's not the big yellow expanse on the globe, it's another China. Another hypothesis, another supposition. In a sense, it's a part of myself that's been cut off by the word China.

I wander through China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi. My adventures take me to the waiting room of the nearby dentist, to the bank teller's window. I can go everywhere and I don't go anywhere.

Tokyo - one day, as I ride the Yamanote Loop, all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. And I'll be holding my ticket, watching it all. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn't a place for me. That is how we will lose our speech, how our dreams will turn to mist. The way our adolescence, so tedious we worried it would last forever, evaporated.

Misdiagnosis, as a psychiatrist might say, as it was with that Chinese girl. Maybe, in the end, our hopes were the wrong way around. But what am I, what are you, if not a misdiagnosis? And if so, is there a way out?

Even so, I have packed into a trunk my faithful little outfielder's pride. I sit on the stone steps by the harbor, and I wait for that slow boat to China. It is due to appear on the blank horizon. I am thinking about China, the shining roofs, the verdant fields.

Let loss and destruction come my way. They are nothing to me. I am not afraid. Any more than the clean-up batter fears the inside fastball, any more than the committed revolutionary fears the garrote. If only, if only . . .

Oh, friends, my friends, China is so far away.

- translated by Alfred Birnbaum
The Elephant Vanishes (short stories) - The Slow Boat to China
Haruki Murakami

today is 1 august. i dont know what to say.
as usual my day has a fair share of highlights and disappointments...
or is it a fair share? is it not...
however lousy my life is im trying to acheive my best from today onwards...
just that i was told i might only get a b+ for amus if i do not put in extra practice for piano.
oh god help me...
but all my nice teachers have been extremely nice to me...so maybe, not maybe, i shld work harder.