It seems that it had been some time since I post. Nothing actually much to update on anyways. Things are going ......well, they are going.

It is raining again but I love the rain somehow. My laptop is down with virus, which is sad, and I realized that it is like a friend to me, my sputnik sweetheart to me. I am now using the desktop that my elder sister usually uses. It is slow with tones of rubbish in the recycle bin, which she does not border to clean up despite knowing it should be done and a keyboard that is like dusty. I have absolutely no idea how she is able to bear with it. I think I am fortunate though so I should not be complaining but now I realized it is hard for me to live without a computer and so I clear up some of the stuff in the desktop.

The IT guy will be here on Monday and for now I cannot really do my reports, and everything else but now I learn a lesson to have a backup plan. Hopefully all the stuff I have in the laptop will not be gone or something.

On the other hand, nothing related to the computer, I guess I am the most inconsistent reader ever. I love to bury myself with good books and some music most of the time and it is amazing that within the night, I actually finish one reading one novel and two books of poetry collection. Perhaps without the distraction of the laptop and the Internet I am reading more this weekend. However, at times I can go without reading for 3 to 4 days when I am busy or something. I am not sure why but writing things down make me feel good and better somehow like some release of tension or something. I guess I express myself best in terms of writing. Perhaps it is like putting down the demons in paper and paper is more patient than a person but now of course with the keyboard and it is with the technology little gods.

I am not sure why but I like Haruki Murakami's stuff a lot though. I am not even reading Harry Potter again. I think the first book was brilliant but then I just cannot understand why everyone else is so obsessed over it all of sudden. I read the books back then when I was in secondary school before this whole Harry Potter craze sort of came out. Now I am not sure why I am not as fond of it or find it pretty much exciting. Maybe I do not like commercialism but yet in a world when money talks I think they are a success next to Dan Brown's books. Murakami's work is pretty out of the world but nevertheless beautiful and here are some of the lines again I have stolen:

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world's first man made satellite. Spuntnik I, from the Bailkanor Space Centre in the Republic of Kazakhstan, Sputnik was 58 cm in diameter, weighted 83.6 kilogram and orbited the earth in 96 minutes and 12 seconds.

On 3 November of the same year, Sputnik II was successfully launched, with the dog Laika on the board. Laika became the first living being to leave the earth's atmosphere but the satellite was never recovered and Laika ended up sacrificed for the sale of biological research in space.

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I like the metaphor they used it here:

"I understand what you mean by precarious. Sometimes I feel so -- I don’t know -- the lonely kind of helplessness feeling when everything you used to have been ripped away. Like there is no more gravity and I am left to drift in outer space and have no idea where I am going."

"Like a little lost Sputnik?"

"I guess so."

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What is the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them are yearning looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here to just nourish human’s loneliness? "

"I turned face up on the slab of the stone, gazed at the sky and thought about all the man made satellites spinning around the earth the horizon in was still etched in a faint glow and stars began to blink on the deep, wine colored sky. I glazed among them for the light of a satellite but it was still too bright to spot one with the naked eye. The sprinkling of stars looked nailed to the spot, unmoving. I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendents of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part and never to meet again. No word passing between them. No promise to keep."

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We walk and we seek but I guess most people travel on earth without quite connecting to it though at times.

Sources, notes and external links:

Find out more at Murakami's site

Labels: Haruki Murakami, On the bookshelf, Sputnik Sweetheart

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