Monday, November 23, 2015
Not Stuck in an Ikea Wardrobe but Feel Stuck Nonetheless
So I finished reading Romain Puértolas's
L'Extraordinaire Voyage du Fakir qui Etait Resté Coincé dans une Armoire Ikea (The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe). Did I like it? No, not really. I wish I can say that a big part of it because I didn't understand each and every single french word there, but really it's not that. It was a struggle sometime not being able to understand everything. I really couldn't find a English pdf version of the book. I did find the French pdf version of it and with Google translate, I had a somewhat translated English version. Somewhat because Google translation is not perfect so it can get confusing, but usually I understood the big picture, it's just the little details, the meaning of some words that I needed help with. Anyway, so with the translation to illuminate me, I still couldn't like this book. Around halfway towards the end, the book reminded me of Jonas Jonasson's
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window. I like that book even though the story is driven by serendipitous moments, not unlike this one. It's just with this one, there are just some things that cannot have happened, example: someone giving 100,000 euros cash to an unknown stranger for advance publishing rights of a book and a poor Indian guy being able to get a multiple entry Schengen visa on his first trip oversea. I can take lucky and serendipitous moments because it's a story and a fiction, but when you're trying to add seriously impossible things, then I just get annoyed. Anyways, so when I finished it, I was just happy to move on.
The next book, 9th this year if I can finish it before the year ends, is
Silence by Shūsaku Endō. Martin Scorsese is going to make a movie of it and the book cover is really nice. So I have high hope which I think will be fulfilled. I need my brain to be stimulated. You would think that trying to read a French book will please my brain with the challenges, perhaps in a way it did, but without a nice story, I was just still bored.
Speaking of French, the recent terror attack in Paris really shocked me and I have to admit it made me quite afraid. Last week after class when I was passing by Orchard station on my way back, I thought of if a terrorist decided to blow himself there, we would all just die. The world is so not safe right now and it's so random that you really can't know if it's your last day on earth. I know it's perhaps paranoia speaking and it's such a defeatist attitude to take and by feeling this way, we are letting the terrorist win, but darn seriously we need a way to stop these insane misguided people :(
Then reading CNN, there's all this talk by US presidential candidates that they would stop refugees settling in America, one even proposed only letting in Christian and not Muslims. How is it not racist? I don't understand how they could stand up and speak like that in front of their fellow men, women, and children. Children who might look up to them! Seriously?!? They're trying to be elected as leaders and they openly propose ideas which are inhumane. What if one day the situation is reversed. In the movie
The Day After Tomorrow, many Americans ended up as refugees in Mexico. Some really bad thing could happen and reverse the situation. I guess people who think it's okay to be racist are also incapable to think of karma.
The whole thing also made me think of
The Walking Dead, in which Rick wanted to stop taking in people. Even in a zombie apocalypse world, I disagree fully with Rick, and these candidates are pretty much proposing the same thing. It's sad and I know the arguments can be made on why the refugee problems have to be a West problems with so little of the rich Muslim countries helping to alleviate the situation. It is a true argument to be made and I do think that Muslim countries with resources should play a bigger role in helping with refugee crisis and ISIS. Everything is so broken in this world and it can be very depressing that everything is just going wrong all the time.
With that, I guess you can guess that I'm in a such pessimistic mode. I guess I am. The year is ending and I do get depressed of that, thinking of having to be older and spend another day in the same existence as I have been having. I don't think one can be truly happy in life if one feels stuck in their life. Perhaps I should embrace the situation I'm in. I know there are many people who would like to have my kind of life. The other day I watched this info ad on TV and I almost cried because it told the story of an old widower who doesn't have much and his grown son has cerebral palsy. I have more than that man and I don't have as much trouble as him and yet he has this positive and grateful outlook of life and I pretty much sin every day for hating the life I have. I pretty much oscillate between not loving and not being thankful for my life to hating myself for feeling that way. That pretty much sums up why I'm unhappy. As I wrote that last sentence, I hesitated to let it be posted. I guess because it will show how flawed I am, but I think many people already think I am so flawed anyway, so why bother in keeping up with the image that I don't actually have.
:) eKa @ 5:57:00 PM •