i bought my childhood back for 10 bucks. how? thru wii. wow, the wonders of modern technology!

my younger sister bought me and my hubby a wii as a belated wedding present (took her that long but i’m not complaining as it paid off). she told me that i can download old school super mario brothers for a very cheap price. i got excited at the prospect of playing it once again and reliving the glory of finishing the game so i wasted no time and made the purchase. and as expected, i got nostalgic.

mario and i (ok, luigi too. though i rarely played him) go back a long way and by that, i meant the age of family computers. ugh, i’m that old. my mom gave us a famicom as a christmas present when i was in sixth grade.and i remember spending christmas break that year playing and mastering  as many games as possible and as much as i could. actually, i can’t remember anyone in the family playing as much as i did. possibly because i hogged it. but there were a few times when i caught my mom or my dad playing past midnight.

i was an innately skilled player back in the day. i finished a number of games when no one else in the family had. but finishing the super mario after countless attempts (thanks to hundred lives) would always be the peak of my famicom career. soon after, i grew up and stopped playing altogether. in a way, saving the princess signified the end of my childhood and became the threshold of my youth. indeed, i finished the game when i was a high school freshman, at a time when my interest already shifted to boys living and tangible and mario, the small, plump, mustached mario, obviously was an alternate reality and no more than a childhood friend whom i needed to help save her princess.

yesterday, i played super mario with the same level of enthusiasm that i had when i was a kid. and it’s comforting to know that i haven’t lost my skills yet. i managed to get the hundred lives and navigated myself thru world 8. i haven’t finished the game yet. i figured there is no hurry this time. when my mom saw me playing, she said that i still sat the same way as i did before while playing. and she too remembered the other games she used to play – circus, galaga, 1982, rainbow island and the car race. all those memories. wouldn’t it be nice to have a hundred lives and some ‘one-up’ in between, so we can have the luxury of dying if we’d rather start a new life over or we can get as many chances as we want when we err? it’s ok though that we don’t get these life bonuses in the real world. at least for now, technology has enabled us to relive snippets of our childhood for a few bucks. in truth though, what it’s done to me is something that cannot be quantified. priceless, it truly is.

it’s summer and the weather lately has been pushing me to read r/hr fan fictions.

i started reading harry potter fan fictions summer of 2005. the sixth book in the series was recently released then and after reading the book in a span of two days (i attended a party so i wasn’t able to finish it in a day as much as i wanted to), i felt that there was something amiss. obviously, i craved for more. being the self-confessed obsessed ron-hermione shipper that i was (still am and will forever be), i thought that many things happened in between those pages that j.k. rowling chose not to write about. i sought for the undisclosed romance that  i was absolutely convinced existed in the missing pages of the book.

so i went to the next best thing – google. i searched for stories that would quench my thirst for r/hr romance and google did not disappoint. in fact, i was overwhelmed with the results i got. i never imagined that there were so many thousands of fans as devoted to r/hr as i was, whose written works were what exactly i was looking for.

i remember the first couple of stories i read – the multi-chaptered la vie en rose and the one-shot not as a last resort. i enjoyed both because the characters stayed true to the books and there was a story to support them. but there was too much literature that it was difficult to filter which ones were well-written and which ones were as bad as tabloid reading. fortunately for me, i soon found out through my sister that there is checkmated.com, a ron-hermione fan fiction archive. all the stories in the site are not only well-written; they are also proof read and edited before publishing. since then, i have stopped googling r/hr stories and became a regular visitor of checkmated. to this day, my two favorite fan fictions can be found in checkmated: the book of morgan la fey and the final reckoning by lavenderbrown.

if there is one thing to be said of fan fictions, it is that the magnitude of people’s imagination is truly limitless. and i envy such imagination.

abashedly confused. this is how i feel after finishing h. murakami’s kafka on the shore. the story seems simple in the beginning. kafka, a 15 year old runaway tries to be the toughest teen in the world while searching for a home away from home. on the other hand, nakata who has the strange ability of talking to cats is hired to find a missing cat and in the process murders a man (AND SPOILER ALERT!) who happens to be kafka’s father. so what’s so complicated about this? everything in between. weird things that happens in the story and those metaphors that abound and i don’t even know where to begin with – kafka waking up with a blood on his shirt, the mysterious passing out of school children that wiped out nakano’s memories, the appearance of johnny walker and colonel sanders, the oedipal propechy that is the salient theme, the ghost of a 15-year old ms. saeki appearing at night, the entrance stone, the forest. just remembering all these images in the book make my head spin in absolute chaos.

but this is not to say i didn’t like the book. oddly enough, i enjoyed reading the book, in a masochistic way of liking it. it’s a pain because there are so many things i wish i understand but i don’t and yet it pleases me at the same time because it’s so imaginative in style and i’m not even sure if there is indeed only one way of looking at it. this is to say, it is not open to any other interpretation but the author’s. gah! i wish i was back in school taking up a course on japanese literature with focus on murakami’s works. perhaps then i would gain better and in-depth understanding of his writing.

my favorite part in the book was when kafka walks into the small quiet town in the heart of a forest near the end of the story. it is so surreal in every way imaginable. is kafka in limbo? in a parallel universe? or in dharma initiative? (lost fans anyone?) the possibilities are limitless to the analytical mind. i read somewhere that the key to understanding murakami’s works is to read the book again. but right now, i’d rather be in a state of confusion than be lost in such metaphysical world. in truth, i’d rather listen to kafka on the shore if this recording truly exists. i’m pretty sure it’d be as haunting as the song somewhere in time.

personally, reading kafka on the shore is like watching a lyrical dancer on stage. i don’t really get the overall meaning of the dance but i feel the emotions associated to it and with this, i conjure my own images. for me, i think this is enough because understanding its totality may take away the true beauty that lies beneath. and i’d rather preserve it this way, thank you very much.

 

i went to ross yesterday and i got myself some great hauls. for anyone who is not familar with ross, it’s the capitalist USA’s gift to middle class shoppers and bargain hunters like i am. ross carries ‘designer and brand name fashions for women, men, kids and home at everyday savings of 20-60% compared to department and specialty stores.’ they also have home decor at very affordable prices. in fact, most of our first purchases for our apartment in santa barbara were from ross – the kitchen and dining ware, the beddings, the home accents. ross is very similar to marshalls although i think the former’s prices are still a tad cheaper than the latter’s.

 

anyway, i was so ecstatic to have bought brand new DVD set of lord of the rings: two towers and return of the king platinum series special extended edition for only $4.99 each. no kidding, halflings! it’s like gollum finding my precious under the river. it’s a little unfortunate that there is no the fellowship of the ring. but i’m planning to scrounge around the other ross stores here in the hope of being able to buy it too.

 

LOTR is my favorite movie of all time. i mean if someone asks me what my favorite movie is, i will say LOTR without even thinking twice. i have seen the movie trilogy countless times – in the theatres, in DVD, in cable and local TV channels and yet i would still want to watch it a thousand times over. since its DVD release, i’ve always wanted to get myself a copy but everytime, the cheap side of me overpowers my urge to buy the set.

 

i can’t wait to watch the films on DVD along with the documentaries about the filming process. but for now excuse me while i salivate over my latest precious possessions. 

‘… It’s really only forty-five minutes, and if you allow time for taking off clothes, making some phony gesture of affection, having a bit of banal conversation and getting dressed again, the amount of time spent actually having sex is about eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes. The world revolved around something that only took eleven minutes.’

-Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

you know what would totally be a close to orgasmic experience is if i can finish this book in eleven minutes. unfortunately, i’m way off the mark. i have started reading this book over a month ago but i haven’t even made it halfway through. currently, i’m also reading h. murakami’s kafka on the shore and i’m so intrigued by its plot and characters that i can’t even spend eleven minutes of my time on coelho’s book.

truth be told, i am not a fan of coelho. of his five books which i own, i have only finished reading 2 so far. a few close friends of mine were raving about the alchemist when i decided to check for myself what the fuss was about. after reading the novel, i thought that it was comparable to antoine de saint-exupery’s the little prince as both books’ main characters were involved in a journey of self-discovery. but the little prince touched me far more than the alchemist in more ways than one. the zahir was the second coelho book that i finished. i couldn’t resist its pink front cover and although it was a drag, i managed to get to the last page which was a feat considering that lula, my friend who is a self-confessed coelho fan only read a few chapters of it before she returned my book and admitting that she didn’t like it. i have  begun veronika decides to die and by the river piedra, i sat down and cry but i thought they were too dogmatic for my own liking so i put the books down and looked for other reading materials. i think this is why i am not too fond of coelho. i view his books as tediously didactic in style such that the profundity of his works gives me claustrophobia of some sort. it feels like listening to a self-righteous religious person giving unsolicited advice, or hearing santino talk in may bukas pa. heaven forbid! this is also how i felt with mitch albom’s tuesdays with morrie so i’m not into it as much as i know other people are. of course, people who love coelho (and albom) can argue otherwise. i prefer the style of robert fulghum. he talks about life values and lessons even in the most trivial of experiences but it’s something that we inculcate because they are practicable on a daily basis.

the first few chapters of eleven minutes hooked me until the main character starts seeing an image akin to virgin mary. that’s when i got turned off. still though, i would like to finish eleven minutes if only to see if there is enough love in the book to make the eleven minute-ritual last more than the average. and if i can gather enough love for coelho even for a short span of time.