With You

AAA

Inuyasha the Final Act Ending Theme

 

I’ll take you to the higher stage

Now you got blazin’

 

namida wo kakushita tsuyogari na kimi no egao

kata wo daku koto sae sunao ni wa dekinakute

yoake no mukou ni donna mirai ga atte mo

shinjiru koto de shika kaerarenai

 

miushinatte ita kokoro no KAKERA

futari de sagashi ateta shunkan kitto

 

kowashite

oikakete kiri hiraita ano sora de

Seeking my way

hitosuji no hikari ni naru with you

 

naraku no soko naa deguchi wa DOKO?

kimi ni terashidasu houkou igai ni wa kyoumi wa No

koukou to kagayaku kongou no gotoku kabe wo kudakeba kimi ni todoku?

tashikana mono nara kitto nai kara, semete sou shinjite Go on

 

nanika wo sutereba unmei wa yuru sareru no?

taisetsuna mono hodo ude wo suri nukete yuku

kagami ni utsutta genjitsu to kozou no kabe

nigeteru dake ja sou koerarenai

 

ichido wa akiramekaketeta mirai

futari de kaete miseru hanarazu kitto

 

hatenaku

dokomademo deguchi no nai meikyuu de

Seeking my way

ima yatto tadoritsuita with you

 

Oh Yes, I just wanna see our future baby

ima kimi wo hanasete touge wo koeteku

tama no kakera wo motte furueru sono te wo totte

kowaku wa nai sa kimi to boku to de susu mou ze hikari yubisu kata e

 

tatoe mata itsuka tooku hanarete mo

kimi dake wo mitsuke daseru kara

 

kowashite

oikakete kiri hiraita ano sora de

Seeking my way

hitosuji no hikari ni naru

hatenaku

dokomademo deguchi no nai meikyuu de

Seeking my way

ima yatto tadoritsuita with you

 

I’ll take you to the higher stage

Anyway ride me baby

I’ll take you to the higher stage

At last I find you

On Stress Responses, Hitting the Brakes and Losing a Hundred

They say bad luck comes in three.  You’ll see.

 

First bad luck.  Being stuck in a scientific forum on stress responses about plants.  Not that it’s really unimportant; of course I knew that the plants get stressed too because of environmental conditions!  Yep, I understood that kind of mechanism anyway, at least, the general idea. But  delving deep on the how and the why of it is really excruciating for my un-scientific brain, encountering weird words like ‘regulomes’ ‘arabidopsis’ RAV1’, ‘protein chaperon’ or ‘irreversible hydro-churva’ I am more preoccupied with the smell of coffee and the sound of biscuit wrappers.  You can’t blame me, I haven’t eaten my lunch – it’s a straight Khareen-you-have-to-listen experience from 10:00 am to 3:30 pm.  Plus, other people are nodding, and it made me feel like I am really an idiot.  But I have no choice though, I need to come up with a paper about it and pass it to Mr. Professor for next week.  Considering that I didn’t pass his first exam, need I say I have to comply this requirement? Uh huh.

The bright side: the coffee.

Bad trip: I don’t know what to write about it.

 

Second bad luck. Losing a hundred, when you don’t have any money anymore can be really dangerous. And that is supposed to be my transpo fare back home, but i-don’t-know-what-the-fu—-hell happened but it just dematerialized out of my pocket.  For a moment, I was like really pissed off.  Lucky I’m the photocopy girl – hmmm… I can use the money-which-is-supposed-to-be-for-our-photocopies for the meantime and find a way to nick money out of my -

The bright side:  I’m the photocopy girl!

Bad trip: I’m still the photocopy girl.

 

This is the second time that I’m in the jeepney and a vehicle bumps into us from behind.  The first time, I was with with a friend in the front seat.  I still could feel the creeps whenever I think about it.  It gave me the jelly-like legs (which is supposed to be felt only when your crush had just passed you by).  The second time I was off to Badminton World for that day’s badminton match.  And then, the jeep came into a halt all of a sudden (I felt it right there!) and then something bumped into us – God knows who’s the driver – looked like a rich guy – and I felt like hugging the person on my right (I didn’t know him though).  Now, I am worrying.  Because my friends say that I will die the third time around.  Creeps.  But they are just scaring the hell out of me.

The bright side:  The screeching sound of a brake – amazing.

Bad trip:  That may be the last time I’ll hear that. Ha-ha!

Of Snakes, Moral Lessons and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

The usual misconception about Mr. Darwin’s theory is that it meant that humans are great great descendants of apes.  And I’m guilty of believing that, of course, I thought I have known it by heart all through out high school, my teachers discussed about it, they settled debates in which sometimes I am shunted to the affirmative side and forced to defend Mr. Darwin.  It was only in college that I realized the whole truth that the theory was really about the idea that apes and humans have the same common and one ancestor.  The idea came really as shocking to me, as we have been taught that we really were descendants of monkeys.  But even worse was this idea of mine that Mr. Darwin formulated this theory because of his self-realization that he looked like an ape.

***

Whenever we talked about stories in high school, we never really discussed the story as it is, not in the same way that we discussed it in our major class. We don’t talk about the historical and cultural contexts, the underlying motives or the author’s background.   The main focus for the story itself is not even the plot construction, how the events unfold, but it had always been about the moral lesson.  Yep, I knew how to derive moral lessons out of those stories.  But I remember one time when we were tasked to review a story and surprisingly, I couldn’t derive a single stinking moral lesson out of it. Why though?

I forgot the title of the story and the whole idea, but all I could remember was it was just a reflection of something, a realization of an event perhaps, but I couldn’t categorize it as a moral lesson really.  That disturbed me a lot. Are all short stories required to have a moral lesson? I think not, but it should have an insight to ponder on at least.  And for me, an insight is equally different from a moral lesson.

Maybe that time the moral lesson of the story couldn’t penetrate in my head.  Or maybe I was turning bad.  Sigh.  Either of the two will do.

***

There was a time when I forgot the readings for the next major class. As I can’t concentrate without my own personal readings (with marginal notes and own private scribbles, haha…) I went back to the boarding house which was just a walking distance from school.  The creepy part was that, as I was about to reach the main library, I encountered a snake just a step away from me.  It was a green snake, all through out, and totally gross.  You might puke yourself if you’d see that.  I ran back to school, I could almost climb the oblation statue for help.  Jeez, that snake, when I think about it in my head, it gives me the creeps.  I ran back to school and cried.  Uh huh, the fear of death because of one grossly animal.  Because of that incident, I couldn’t visit the main library anymore (which was actually loaded with more interesting books) and I couldn’t go home without someone to share death in case the green snake will strike again.

Chain Messages

It’s really weird right, when suddenly your long lost text mate, (perhaps a high school friend) texted you.  You’re happy of course, knowing that you haven’t keep in touch with each other for so many weeks but you just realized that’s it’s just one of those dim-witted forwarding messages that makes your head reel like mad.   These messages that I’m talking about are those messages that contain words like “pass this message or you’ll die”, “I’m not joking, tested and proven, you have to pass this”, “you’ll receive a miracle after 10 days if you pass this to nth people…” and the worst message I received was “this is a curse, you have to pass this or your mother will die…”. It’s insulting in a way, on how people reacted so initially at these messages, and perhaps clamoring to forward it to his/her legions.  Sometimes, I feel afraid too, but then I’d realized that these messages are really absurd in a way.  And it makes me feel sad that this maybe the only freaking reason to text me, just because I’m one of those nth people, or because he or she is running out of text mates to send it to.  Weird, but true. But these messages really piss me off.  I think the how and why of it is self-explanatory enough.

I never pass messages like that to my friends, but still I’m alive and kicking.

About Natsuki Takaya

Natsuki Takaya

If you are a certified manga addict, then perhaps you would know her.  Natsuki Takaya is the Japanese manga artist of the famous manga Fruits Basket (you probably have seen the anime adaptation) J.  That’s her pen name – she is born as Naka Hatake, on July 7, under the star sign Cancer.

 

I love her manga really – oh, I also love the 26-episode anime adaptation.  Because of the famous Fruits Basket manga, she received the Kodansha Manga Award for shojo in 2001.

 

My favorite Fruits Basket character is Kyou, the cat – hmmm, I can’t deny he’s really appealing, and I also like the character of the wacky Shigure-san.

 

I’m currently reading her manga Boku ga Utau to Kimi wa Warau Kara, though I’m really slow in terms of reading it because the semester is going to be over soon and lots and lots and lots of things are to be done.  whew!

Toddler Trips

As a student, I enjoy travelling.

People see me as a homebody kind of person. Yes, I am. But I realized that the more you travel, the more you can get more insights about other people in other places. That is why as of the moment, i enjoy travelling. Commuting, that is. Riding buses and taxis. Just to go out from my comfort zone and explore different place on my own.

Of Writing Formal Poetry and Free Verse

A free verse is an unrhymed verse without a consistent metrical pattern.  In most cases, the free verse is initially thought to be easier than writing formal poetry mainly because it is not governed with any metrical conventions and anyone could just readily rush into writing lines and make them form like a poem.  However, I find writing free verse much harder than writing a formal poem, mainly because you don’t have any idea how to start.  The length of each line is an arbitrary choice of the writer. Also, I find writing free verse very demanding than writing formal poetry because in the first place, free verse requires you to have a well-tuned ear to be able to achieve the right and appropriate rhythm as it approximates your line breaks.  Since the line break is also an arbitrary choice of the writer, free verse entails a lot of revisions especially if there is a variation of rhythms in a poem.  Without a particular meter, it is difficult to decide when to pause or when to cut your line.  Some pauses naturally (caesuras) while some writers prefer their lines to be enjambed – where there is a continuation from one line of verse into the next line without a pause.  And this decision is crucial, as it is more prone to poetic flaws, like awkwardness in readability, and misinterpretation.  The appropriate usage of them would accentuate and supplement the emotion, tension and the rhythm of the poem.  Writing free verse, for me, should be done with utmost subtlety, and the writer should take into consideration how to deliver the intended effect that he/she has in his/her mind through his/her line breaks.

On the other hand, formal poetry puts greater premium and focus on formal elements such as rhymes, meters, rhythms etc., but it is not as easy as arranging syllables to fit a certain poetic convention, because one must also take considerations that the poem, in the first place, should make sense.  In formal poetry, form is an aesthetic attribute.  I find writing metered poems really pleasurable because I like experiencing the constraints as I meet a certain metrical expectation.  Moreover, some words naturally (or in some time) resist being ‘co-opted’ in the metrical pattern, but this only inevitably urges me to strive hard to get the right meter.

I find writing metered poems easier than free verse, which is ironic because I thought that the latter is easier before since the poems you’ll make would not be subjected in metered expectations.  At some point, I even forgot that I was actually writing a metered poem – there are times when the words and phrases are naturally arranged in the required meter.  What so good about writing metered poems is that you end up feeling satisfied after writing the poems, and the whole process of writing is pleasurable.  Free verse is hard to write mainly because you have to justify the arbitrariness of line breaks.  Moreover, free verse requires so much from a poet – you have to have a good ear to be able to get the right pace or rhythm of the poem and to experiment the variation of rhythms.

In any case, I would prefer to read a poem with complete naturalness of rhythmical expression, smooth and seamless, not rough and chopped sentences.

Creative Writing Through Other Arts

For me, creative writing serves as a tool for the creation of the other arts as well such as movement arts, music and visual poetry – although in the case of the latter, it can be the other way too.  Incorporating rhythm, meter and rhyme to enhance the form of the genre (eg. poetry, lyrics) is equally important aside from establishing a very effective content and this is where both movement arts and music flourishes.  With these, movement arts and music are said to be effective especially if one carefully chooses the appropriate words to assign to a specific tone, theme, rhythm or melody.  This would produce a very powerful effect for the spectators.  Personally, this is evident in speech choir presentations and performances in movements in poetry.

 

Contemporary writers usually use at least a single concrete imagery to convey their fresh insights that they have in their minds.  Such use of concrete metaphors instead of abstract ideas renders the image vivid and picturesque.  And this is where the mental imagery that one gets from reading a literary piece comes in:  when it is depicted through visual arts, whether natural or artificial, or whether by photography or graphic arts.  As exemplified by Horace in his treatise, The Art of Poetry, the use of imagery (eg in poetry) merits the same attention or treatment as that of the painting (ut pictura poesis – like painting, so is poetry).



Mutations

The beginning of my transformation from a super darling tot to a very modest lady (well not really, but to add a bit of flavor, let it be that way anyway) started when I was in elementary.  I remember back then when I used to join in a war-play, where instead of throwing missiles and bombs – stones became a necessity to win the game.  I, of course, manage to come out unscathed, because I played the role as the captured princess, between the two supposedly warring states, (all my childhood friends were boys), and so they were all trying to snatch me from the clutches of each other, and vice versa.

 

When I was in the later part of my grade school years I outgrew these kinds of things – playing with guys outdoors were starting to be really awkward.  And having a crush – a childish attraction to one of my playmates became really confusing for me.  Finally, it’s as if an invisible force separated me from them.  The feeling to sever ties between us was mutual too.

 

Now, that I am in college I realized how cool it was to be a kid – you don’t have to think about a lot of serious stuffs, and you would gladly appreciate anything in this world.  I have lost that kind of feeling for quite a while.  I sure want to take those back.

Midsummer Madness

I miss those times when I was still taking a Shakespeare subject, and one of the stories that I will never forget is Midsummer Night’s Dream.  You know, the one about the political nobles, middle class workers and laborers and supernatural beings unified in a unique and amusing comedy story.  Instead of the conventional love triangle, it becomes a love quadrangle for Lysander, Hermia, Helena and Demetrius!

 

One interesting fact about this play is that it incorporates three distinct plots embodied in three different worlds which tie up a unified theme or idea. The three worlds include (a) young lovers in the court of Theseus (b) world of Oberon and Titania and (c) the artisan’s world.  The comedy starts when they all meet in the woods where laws are totally suspended, and a character named Puck messes up with them.  A tangled love affair!

 

I will never forget when Lysander said ‘the course of true love never did run smooth…’ to Hermia, it is my favorite line in the play.

 

So why Midsummer Night’s Dream?  In his epilogue, Puck said that all mistakes he made during the course of time should be forgotten and should be thought as a dream.