Fringe-Soul

"We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had no souls at all."


Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

She presses on, enthusiasm kindling within her.

The title of this post was a sample sentence in the "Kindle" definition wallpaper which was the first thing I saw when I turned on my newly purchased Kindle 3 Wifi. To be able to store 3500 e-books basically enables the user to carry his whole library with him! oh boy! No need for paperbacks that get borrowed by friends or dormmates or officemates, and eventually get lost. The owner just can't track 'em anymore. With the kindle, you could stay on track in your reading list and listen to music too! It has an MP3 player but you can't choose the tracks to play on your whole music folder, you just either pause or skip to the next track. This feature needs some upgrade in the near future. Plus you can't read in the dark since there's no built-in light (which is also a plus on the energy-consumption side, the kindle could last up to 3 weeks!). And the e-ink technology ensures that there'll be no glare when you read under strong external light. The kindle is like printed text, it's black and white. and with wifi, browsing the net in B&W is surely something new. haha. I love, I love, I love my new baby. :) Now I can reread my Murakami books. Murakami, hands down, writes the most beautifully surreal sad fiction.

a crappy photo of my kindle. I love how the wallpaper changes everytime you put it on sleep mode.

All hail Jessica Zafra!

My own theory of devolutionAfter our supposed-to-be artstud class (sir kept us waiting..waaah!!), I went to the educ lib to find Sputnik Sweetheart, that Murakami book that I kept raving about in the past. To my dismay, it was for room use only and was located in the "Reading for Pleasure" corner... I leafed through it since I can't take it home and began reading a few paragraphs. I didn't pay attention to the page numbers and so I found myself on page23 and I can't seem to put it down. But I really have to go to my freakin' computer programming class so I left. I went back after class and saw that the book wasn't there anymore. It was with some stranger and he seemed too attached that he wouldn't put it down. Waaah! I instead took a Jessica Zafra book, Womanagerie. You can never go wrong with a Zafra book. Haha.. I couldn't stop smiling. The guy (with dreadlocks, by the way, and a meter in front of whom I've humiliated myself with later on by being so tactless and saying that he's not my type but I love his hair.. darn!) beside me seemed annoyed. But what the heck. Let me share to you one of her articles in what seemed to be one hell of a great read... I really could relate to this.. There's no denying it. XD

by Jessica Zafra

See, I have this theory about alcohol. The more you drink, the lower you go down the evolutionary ladder. When you start swigging the vodka (or the poison of your choice), you're recognizably human. A few shots later, the change begins.

Your vision blurs. The room appears to be spinning. Slowly, at first, then you feel like you're inside a blender with some oranges and ice. Your face feels lopsided, and you ask your drinking companions if one side of your face is larger than the other. And when you have to go to the bathroom, walking upright makes you nauseous. You sort of slouch over with your arms down to your knees and do an ape-like shuffle... And that's when you've gone APE. Monkey. Simian. You've just rejoined our distant relatives.

But you don't stop drinking, nonono. What, and be a spoilsport? You go on swilling the drink of depressed Russians, the stuff they imbibe because it takes so long to line up for Coke. Soon, you can't even stay on your feet anymore. Your legs turn into vestigial appendages (meaning they're there but you can't use them). And if you have to travel to another part of the room, you crawl over. You slither on your hands and stomach. You even make a cursing noise that resembles hissing. Bingo. You're in the REPTILE stage.

If you're normally the talkative, hyperverbal sort, you will find that imbibing alcohol not only loosens your tongue, but charges it electrically. First there is a noticeable rise in the volume of your voice. Soon you've got a built-in megaphone. Not only do you insult your friends in a voice that carries all the way to the next block, but you also reveal your darkest secrets to people you just met two hours ago. You stop talking and you start speechifying. You get pompous. Eventually you stop making sense. A sure sign that you've devolved to the POLITICIAN level, a stage closely related to reptiles particularly crocodiles (buwaya). It is here that you are at your most obnoxious.

Fortunately the politician stage passes, although the duration varies from person to person. Some verbose types can go on for hours, in which case it is necessary to force feed them several kilos of polvoron (a very effective mouth sealant). On the other hand, you could tape everything they say, and make some bucks through good old honest blackmail.

You keep on drinking, and the alcohol content of your blood continues to rise. Your brains are getting pickled. If you should insist upon driving yourself home, you will make things really easy for the mortuary people. They wouldn't have to embalm you anymore, they can just stick you in a jar and put you under bright lights for your grieving relatives. You can't even crawl anymore, so in your warped state of mind, you attempt to swim on the floor. This is either the Sammy the Sperm phase, in which you regress to the time you were racing several thousand other sperm cells to reach that egg, or the FISH phase, fish being lower down the food chain.

Soon your body refuses to take any more pickling, and goes to sleep on you. You pass out on whatever surface you happen to be on. Hopefully you land on a surface that is not conducive to pneumonia. (This is why you must make sure friends are present when you drink. If you get smashed, you can be reasonably sure they won't leave you on the street to get run over by a truck.). When you've lost consciousness, you've gone as far down the evolutionary ladder as you can. You're not even a living organism anymore, you're a ROCK.

The next morning, the process of evolution starts up again. You wake up, and you ask. "How did I get here? Where am I? What's my name?" Your mouth tastes like toxic waste, battery acid, or something that you forgot to put in the refrigerator that developed green spots. Your head is being bludgeoned at regular intervals with an invisible bag of shot.

You mouth vile things - you're a politician. You crawl toward the bathroom - you're a reptile. You stand on your legs to reach the sink - you're a monkey. You throw up, and between heaves, you swear never to touch The Vodka from Hell again. You're making resolutions you know you won't keep - Congratulations, you're human again.