Today’s Picture on Wikipedia

Clothes hanging on a terrace in Toledo. Clouds of pink and powder blue, ethereal Monet fading in a horizon where the future’s being built out of haze and white lines. My mind dives into the warm shades of the bricks and tiles and painted walls, escaping from the ever-so-green summergreen slithering green flying green melting underneath this rain of liquid steel. The apostles in the cathedral are debating tomorrow’s news, but nobody in town could talk about what’s going on with me today. And nothing moves around me, as if the world made of stone were this and not that, not that corner amid the thorny tower that reaches for the sky.

Bon Voyage, Gilmore Girls

Thanks to YouTube, I watched the Gilmore Girls series finale some nights ago. It’s over. The only TV show I seriously followed for a long time is gone forever.

I started watching GG when I was a lazy first-year student who had just returned from Cornfieldland, Iowa. I had hated that town so much, and now that I was back in my city, I started missing it again. Gilmore Girls was a window into an ideal version of the world I never learned to love. The golden/orange/terracotta trees on the introduction background would send me back to a beautiful yet short-lived realm in which leaves fell down like rain on a clear blue sky. Rory was the girl I somehow wished I could be—smart, beautiful, lucky—with the perfect hair and the clothes that always fit, and the good-looking boys around her. And yet, sitting at the other side of the screen with a bowl of cereal was a scruffy first-year student in a school which turned out worse than her previous one, expecting midnight phone calls from a boyfriend far as far could be and longing for a life that could’ve continued had it not been so full of unhealthy food and dissatisfaction.

Now that Rory has had her wish of becoming a reporter come true, I, too, find myself exactly at the place where I wanted to be long ago. Love and distance are still synonyms, but the lingering yearning is no longer there. Everything I want is contained in some part of my life, and everything I wanted to be is sitting right here writing about yet another fun TV show that’s just been cancelled.

George Harrison Sings

If you love George Harrison as much as I do, you have to watch this:

Now, who gets the last laugh, Eric Idle?

Certum scio

I often find myself amazed at the things I’ve come to know and the things that still remain far from my understanding. I know I had wanted to come to Japan for a very, very long time, but now that I’m here I’ve come to see that leading a life in this country does not equate to grasping its people and culture. What can I say about Japan after a year of isolation in a Japanese language institute in Tokyo? What can I say about it after a month of abnormally slow immersion in the world of Japanese education? I thought I knew so much, I thought everything had been given to me by that quiet boy sitting opposite to me that afternoon in summer camp. How wrong and naïve of me to believe that. Or maybe I just didn’t listen when he told me why he refused to go back to the air I so desperately wanted to breathe.

Somedays I ask myself what is it that I want to do after this strange cycle is over. Do I want to stay here? Will I become tired of hitting the impenetrable wall that keeps us outsiders from smelling the flowers from inside the garden? Will I ever become able to understand? Coming to this island means becoming unclad of all previous knowledge and struggle from the very beginning, renaming it all, pointing at birds and books and sounds with astounded innocent fingers.

Nevertheless, there is a little light shining in the dark path I crawl on, a light that has become stronger with every trembling inch I cover in this centipede race against myself: I know who I want to spend the rest of my life with. The certainty of this simple fact in my mind leaves me bedazzled every time I stumble upon it in my daily ponderings. If one thing, that one little thing remains in my heart, there is no way I could ever look back and say this lonely quest in the darkness has been anything but worthwhile.