There are two reasons I haven’t updated this blog of mine for this long (I think it’s the longest period yet): The first, nothing (I repeat: nothing) eventful has happened ever since that issue of mine with my stupid neighbors (who, by the way, are still at large); the second, I’ve been feeling lethargic the past few days. In the sense, I open MS-Word, stare at a blank page for a couple of minutes, thinking about nothing in particular, then I shut the computer off and go do something else. I mean, I would have done something else if I had anything else to do. I have books, of course, but I couldn’t read them 24X7, not only for fear of becoming cross-eyed, but also because at a certain point, I get bored of reading, and nothing goes into my head after that unless I take at least an hour’s break. And the laziness issue of mine I mentioned up there—that applies to fan fiction, as well. I haven’t been able to work on any of my ongoing stories, nor have I been able to write anything new, despite the fact that there are ideas blooming in my head. I open MS-Word, and said ideas abandon me. Lethargy is a curse. I could attribute my lethargy to the fact that I’ve been awfully deprived of sleep for the past week or so, the fact that I’m on summer break notwithstanding. During the day I feel like I could just pop off any minute, and at night, it’s almost impossible for me to go to sleep without tossing and turning in bed for at least an hour. And I wake up every morning with this bad ache in the neck that disappears after a while, but makes me feel crippled while it lasts. Also, for the past week or so, I’ve consistently felt this soreness in my shoulder that I couldn’t attribute to anything. I could barely move my right arm a couple of hours ago. Said soreness gets in the way of my swimming schedule, which is the most exasperating thing that could happen to you in the summer. I haven’t gone swimming in days, and it’s all because my joints are behaving as though they were a hundred years old or something. Of course, the pain could be a result of my sleeping position, in which case nothing can be done about it except stay up all night.
Bleach 353 was disturbing. I know it’s been almost a week since it came out, but I’ve yet to completely get over it. I’d never imagined Ulquiorra would die like that. I mean, until that chapter, Ulquiorra was just another Arrancar I found interesting. After reading it, he became my second favorite character. It was all for the better, I suppose, because if he’d been among my favorite characters before he died, 353 would have hit me a lot harder. And although I pride myself in real life for being emotionally detached to the point of being superciliously apathetic, I tend to become emotional, and almost sentimental when it comes to inanimate objects (the computer, door, etc.) and nonexistent people (that is, fictional characters), especially when it involves death. I mean, I can’t pretend I didn’t expect Ulquiorra to die. In fact, I admit I was frustrated that he didn’t die yet two chapters earlier. It’s all an effect of the dialogue he chose to use, I think, coupled with the fact that he died just standing there even when his vanquisher was reluctant to kill him. Even more than that, the little UlquiHime moment at the very end that led me to add that as one of my favorite pairings. I would have been a little less disturbed if they had at least been able to make contact. Now I’m anxiously waiting for 354 to come out (it should be out tomorrow—since we’re about 12 hours ahead of the United States, and I assume the ones uploading the chapters are from there) because I want to see Orihime’s reaction. On the last page of 353 she looked bewildered and on the verge of breaking down. I really want to know if she’s gotten over her crush on Ichigo and instead fallen in love with Ulquiorra, and I don’t even know why. Another reason I’m looking forward to reading 354 is that the focus finally goes back to the Fake Karakura Town. I’m desperate to see Kyoraku’s fight with Stark.
The weather here is fucking terrible. Some people may consider the subject to be clichéd, and a tool used to prevaricate in uncomfortable conversations—in other words, one may only talk perfunctorily on the matter, and it’s definitely not among the more interesting subjects of conversation. But I think otherwise. It’s the kind of weather you have that decides how much and in what manner you can talk about it. In my case, the weather’s terrible, and I could go on cursing it for pages. But I don’t have the necessary patience at the moment, so one paragraph will have to suffice. Okay. So the weather here sucks like a giant, hungry leech. In fact, I honestly believe—and I’m not being sarcastic—that this place is hotter than the equator. I mean, at the equator, as I’ve read, the temperature hovers around the 30 degrees Celsius mark all year, so while winters aren’t cold, summers aren’t all that hot either (theoretically speaking, at least). But here, the maximum diurnal temperature is hardly ever less than 40 degrees Celsius, which equals 104 degrees Fahrenheit. On top of that, it’s as dry as a desert where I live. (Which is smack in the middle of the Deccan Plateau, and there are two large, perennial rivers on either side of this city. Go figure.) In the afternoon, at around 2, if you step outside, you’ll begin to understand how your clothes feel when you’ve left the dryer on for too long, or, more accurately, how a piece of meat feels when you fry it without oil. The ground radiates heat as though it were paid something to the tune of a billion dollars to do so, and the amount the sun sends in every second on one square-foot of earth could comfortably fuel a hundred rockets headed for the Moon. If you stand outside with a dropper in hand and start squeezing out water, the droplets would evaporate before they hit the ground. I feel sorry for you if you actually believed that. You’d have to be on Venus for that to happen. The general idea is that it’s unbearably hot. Of course, there’s always man’s best friend (for people living around these parts): the air-conditioner, and the ones in our house work really well. I’m more worried about our cars, actually, which are black, and outside for the greater part of the day. My driver, whose IQ (if he has one) hovers threateningly a little above 0, never remembers to roll the windows down to let the heat in the car dissipate into the air outside. Inside the cars it’s probably 50 degrees. So you can imagine how loath I am to go anywhere while the sun’s still up in the sky. Even the morning offers no respite, and today, I fought the urge to turn on the air-conditioner at 9 a.m.
The book by David Baldacci that I made mention of sometime before—it’s not that bad, actually. Reading it is a good exercise for the brain and the detective inside you. For instance, I concluded while reading that a certain someone never paid much attention in grammar class. It’s amusing, actually, how someone who is called a New York Times Bestselling Author can make mistakes in such trivial things. Or maybe I’m the ignorant one, and the mistake I’m alluding to might not even be a mistake. In which case, someone needs to elucidate some things for me. I’ve always thought that the word ‘too’, in the sense, ‘as well’, needs a comma before it—in fact, I know this for sure. David Baldacci, however, liberally uses ‘too’ without the comma. Is it a new trend or something? Because David Baldacci (an American) isn’t the only one who does this; even Jonathan Stroud (a Briton) uses ‘too’ without a comma before it, so it isn’t an American thing (if anything at all.) That aside, the chapters are so short, and they end so abruptly that it reminds me of a lame attempt by a five-year-old to write a novel after he was inspired by the likes of Dr. Seuss. Each chapter focuses on a different scene, so you can imagine how quickly the events in the book move. Such a quality is undesirable in a writer, since it gives the reader the impression that he (the writer) is either a person with extremely limited patience, or one who lacks imagination and basic writing skills. The protagonist, a girl,—surprise, surprise—is the closest thing to a Mary Sue I’ve seen outside of fanfiction.net. She gets on my nerves so much. For one thing, she’s an attention-whore (disguised to sound as though she were suffering depression.) In the first chapter itself, she walks into a bar and picks a fight with a total stranger because she wanted to get her ass kicked badly (and to my glee, that’s exactly what happened to her.) There are tons of other things involving her that irked me. For instance, her towel slipped off her after she emerged from the bath, and when she was in the presence of another man. One would be predisposed to believe she did that on purpose. No, she wasn’t in a large, marble mansion with fountains that spouted wine: she was in a psychiatric hospital because of her ‘depression’, and where she’s supposed to uncover a mystery (according to the synopsis on the back cover of the book.) I feel like bopping someone on the head.
It looks like I made up for all the previous days with this post when it comes to size.
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