Saturday, September 08, 2012

The Life of Pi, Mine, Ted ... And Other Things

I finished reading Life of Pi. While it would be quite a stretch comparing my life currently to the struggle of Pi when he was stranded in the Pacific, I couldn't help feeling that I could relate to the misery and desolate feeling that he was having. While he had every right to be feeling miserable, for me to compare my situation to his, is rather dramatic of me and I'm basically just being ungrateful and such a complainer. I think Life of Pi was pretty good and uplifting except for the last part where he was giving an alternative story of what happened to him. I think for the younger reader, it could be quite traumatic to be going through that part. I wonder why the writer wrote that. He wanted a dark twist in his story to make it appear more intelligent with deeper underlying content? I think it totally ruined the whole hopeful, never-give-up theme going on throughout the story. I am looking forward for the movie and I wondered if it would include this part. The story carries the theme of God throughout but I'm not sure if I am somewhat strengthened in my belief in God or if it would be successful to get the atheists or agnostics to be thinking differently for example. Maybe if the story really happened, it would carry some weight. However there are many people who have survived terrible horrible things and they have attributed God as the reason they are alive, and all these inspiring stories have never really shaken the belief or the lack of of all the atheists and the agnostics.

Anyway, as I was finishing the pages of Life of Pi this week, and he's safe and sound, ready for a new life, I wonder if my life's too gonna change. I wonder and wonder. Right now I'm not seeing land appearing in my horizon so I don't know, but God can just change things around in a blink of an eye. It doesn't help to talk about all the unperfect things in my world but sometime it just seems worse things come my way, like last week. I had some sort of health annoyance that turned into a health scare. Luckily my doctor had some good medicine around and I got better. Obviously I was pretty down with all that, but it made me think that just when you think things are awful in your life, another bigger bad thing happens and it makes all the previous problems seem little and you feel rather amazed that you somewhat don't break apart from all that and is there to face the new problem. I am weird that way. Anyway so look at that, I completed my goal of finishing 5 books this year. It's the most number of books that I have read in a year since even before I came to Singapore and we're only in September now! There are 3 months left in the year and maybe I'll finish reading Bumi Manusia from Pramoedya Ananta Toer that I just started before the year ends. I've only gone through a few pages and so far I like it. The flow of the language is old Indonesian though. It's perhaps the equivalent of reading a Jane Austen's novel or like watching the movie True Grit (as I was reminded when I was reading the book), it's like people don't speak or write that way anymore. It made me stumble a few times, rereading the lines again to understand it more. I wonder if it's because I've been using English more than Indonesian for many years. As I was reading the book, I was curious how the story gets to where it is now. If I'm not mistaken, it started when P.A Toer was telling the story orally to other inmates when he was politically imprisoned. I'm not sure if those story got out and someone wrote it down or if it was written after he got out. Someone should make a movie out of his life, properly though.

I've also started to learn how to crochet. I remember an assignment in my french class with Mr. F where I think we had to write what we want to learn if we have a free time. I wrote knitting or crocheting and baking. So I've finally started to learn how to crochet. I am one who's sceptical on how learning from youtube can really be engaging but I found myself really getting more help in youtube in my crochet attempt. I guess in this case, words and still pictures don't work for me. I'm not sure, maybe I just have trouble following instructions. When I read the instructions for some patterns, I just couldn't get it. Maybe because I'm still in such an early stage. I'm doing the simple granny square now and I think I still suck in changing colors and ending my stitches and overall I don't crochet neatly. I tried to get some yarns today but the store which I thought would have it doesn't have it, so I can't really practice with the changing colors part. I have high hopes to try more things but I have to say I get overwhelmed a lot with the complexity of the patterns :( Also my DELF preparation class took a sharp turn yesterday. We are having 2 teachers now, each for 1 hour and they gave us pages and pages of reading material and exercises. So all the free time that I picture I will have to relax and watch things are substantically cut. I'm not sure how to juggle all this since September also means all the American TV shows that I watch will start again soon. Days with Glee, Walking Dead, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Grey's Anatomy and I think even Downton Abbey is starting soon. So it seems I will start to be really busy in my personal free time.

Now for movies which I managed to watch since the last time I wrote but was lazy to write about. I watch The Expendables 2 with La Gioia some weeks back. I remember the first one was rather boring that I think some of the people I watched it with slept in the middle of it. However when I watched the trailer for the sequel with Van Damme looking pretty cool there, I was interested to watch it and I think La Gioia was the perfect person to watch it with since well she's kinda perhaps grew up with these stars. I think it was actually pretty good and I like it. Too bad they killed Van Damme's character, so he won't get to appear again. Jet Li only appeared for a really short time and yet at the closing credit, he got third billing. I wondered why he was pretty much written out in the adventure, was he getting too expensive? Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis got more screen time and they did have some funny lines. I think Jason Statham was less cool in this one. I guess I'm just drawn to Jean Claude Van Damme.

Then I also watched The Campaign, a comedy with Zach Galifianakis and Will Ferrell. It told the story of the campaign of the republican and democrat candidates to be a congressman. Obviously it's a satire for all the campaigns going on for the USA presidential election. It was funny and entertaining, but the comedy was over the top sometime, not quite intelligent and was rather slapstick, which of course can be expected when you put those people in a movie together. Then today I went to watch Ted which was as outrageous as the idea. It was also funny, but I'm just not into guys who love to get wasted. I was thinking of how a boy who grows up with a living teddy bear can turn out to be quite a loser. It's just not possible for him to grow up as a doctor or something like that because there's already something disturbing in having a living teddy bear be your forever and ever best friend and be around in your life all the time? :P I'm not sure how I feel about the ending but when the ending turned into a happy one, I was thinking it was perhaps one of those things they do to ensure there's a possibility for a sequel. So I guess that's that peeps. As usual, I hope things are glorious in your days!

:) eKa @ 10:21:00 PM •