Curtain Call

Current System Configuration: Hating Valentine's Day
BGM: Lithium Flower by Scott Matthew. The ending theme to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A rare all-English (good English, not Engrish) song featured in a Japanese anime series. I really don't know how to describe this song, but I guess it echoes how I feel right now.
Breakfast: Cereal (Chocochino Crisp)
Lunch: Chicken strips and rice plus linguine in bolognese sauce
Dinner: Nothing, had too much at lunch. Unless you count this tall valencia mocha frappuccino I'm drinking right now.


I should've written this entry a long time ago, or at least soon after my classes finished staging their plays last week. My last entry entitled "Black, White and Shades of Gray" has somehow disappeared. Whether it was a simple technical hiccup or a deliberate act of censorship, I do not know.

Anyway, I'd like to congratulate my classes again for the plays they've staged. Not all of them were successful and none of them were perfect, but I think you guys know what I kept saying in the past. You cannot cram a play.

I've told my students of a story I heard from my cousin and my younger brother, who both used to go to the same elementary school. My cousin's classmates had a skit to perform that they forgot all about until the day of the performance itself. It was about the Garden of Eden, so what they ended up doing was emptying their school folders, drawing animal faces on them, and using those as masks. Abominable.

It doesn't stop there---Adam, of course, had to have a realistic costume. So one of the poor kids was told to take everything off except his underwear---which was colored brown with a crayon and had private parts drawn on it. That must have looked so silly in real life. I don't know how I'd have reacted if I saw it.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, there really are some things that cannot be crammed. If you do manage to cram them, the quality will definitely suffer.

Now, on to the topic of Valentine's Day. I hate Valentine's Day. It may be partly because I'm bitter that I don't have a date. Perhaps. But I also think the whole thing is just a materialistic sham of a celebration. Why would we confine the celebration of love and passion to just one day each year?

I know, I know, it\s idealistic to say that we should celebrate love each and every day of our lives together. But when I saw the streets today (I went to pick up my mom from a little date she had with her female friends, then we went to Starbucks together to take advantage of that coupon that was only valid on Valentine's Day), I couldn't help but see everyone on the street as a victim of today's commercialism.

Valentine's Day is perhaps the second most commercialized special occassion behind Christmas. While Christmas is the single most commercialized special occassion, at least it has a good side to it---it can still be celebrated no matter how little you have. I've had Christmases that saw plenty of gifts, and some that have seen few. I've still been able to enjoy them either way.

V-Day, on the other hand, is cruel. I can see straight through the farce and shallowness of the whole affair, but it can still make me feel jealous of all those couples who get to go out and hold hands and look in each other's eyes, share laughs and good food together. It's very difficult for me, a 22-year-old employed guy, to not feel lonely. What makes it worse is that people do take advantage of this day to take advantage of their dates. Sickening.

Oh God, I know that there is no love that is more satisfying than yours. But you know how I feel---when you walked this earth two millennia ago, you were a Man of Sorrows too. I think it's fair to say that you were among the loneliest men to have ever lived---and yet you were God Almighty, creator of the Universe. You know how it is to love someone and not be loved back---sometimes I myself do things that show I don't love you as much as I should. I guess it's sort of an honor to share the same feelings that my God has. Teach me to delight in you, O Lord. I need to find my heart's rest in you, lest I never find it at all.

~Be Just Or Be Dead~
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ー黒獅子アスラン