Thursday, November 17, 2011

Rawr means I love you in dinosaur

I have a strange relationship with my ex-boyfriend. Whenever I feel down, I turn to him to cheer me up and he does a brilliant job of it. Whenever I feel elated at a recent success, he is the first one I want to talk to about it. We have been together for a year and when we broke up, it was terrible as some break ups go. Even then, we were still communicating and eventually we became close friends, even closer than we had been before. After 4 years, he has become my best pal. We may not have been a success as a couple but as friends, we are certainly rocking it. I am at a stage in my life where I feel like a failure because jobs are hard to come by for fresh grads, through it all he has been my one-man cheering squad. I never hesitate to tell him anything, and he has been very patient with me. I do not know any other guy pal who can bear to listen to my woes, nor any of my girl friends who I can speak to with the same honesty as I talk to him. He is not perfect; he is actually a very forgetful person and it is one of the most annoying things that I hated about him when we were together. He also tends to tease me and mock me, which in a boyfriend is a very annoying attitude but a very endearing one in a friend, no awkwardness involved.  My ex-boyfriend is my rock in the sea of chaos. This is getting dramatic but it is true. Its how I feel. And there’s no one else in my life who has done as much as he did and is currently doing. I love him, of course. But I am safe in the thought that we will never be together again, I do not think I can handle a relationship right now, I am like the infamous Tumblr meme: doomed to be forever alone. 



Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Time and then again

Getting older means getting new perspectives on past books I have read. I read the Belgariad series by David Eddings when I was about 8 years old and I loved it. I read it again this year, 13 years later, and I disliked it. Timelessness is a true test of a book's greatness and David Eddings books have never done it for me. It was a disappointment. I read the Potter series, Tolkien's books, Narnia series, Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle at around that time period and when I read it again a decade or so later, it still holds the same magic, maybe even better. I was irritated with the pace of the Belgariad series, the characters were one dimensional, I find it dull. I think I'll try re-reading them again, maybe I'll find that old spark which made me read them when I was 8. Or maybe I was just a bad judge of books then, I remembered being enamored with Sidney Sheldon books, reading all his books in one summer, and years later, I find them too shallow.

A book that changed your life

Once, during a Christmas away from home, I asked for only one thing: a Harry Potter book. I did not get my wish. The one who ran the the errand of buying the book bought me something else instead. I was furious, how dare that person presume to buy another book instead of the Harry Potter series which is the best fantasy series in the entire world?! The Potter books were sold out and that person bought the book which looked as interesting as Harry Potter. I received The Hobbit, a book by JRR Tolkien. I did not know who he was back then, I was in grade school and was not aware there were other books written aside from Harry Potter (HP was the center of my bookworm existence). I can vividly recall sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at The Hobbit while shedding tears of bitterness at not being able to know what happens next in the Harry Potter series. I refused to read the book, until one day when we went to the beach and as I was and still am a very unsociable creature and having exhausted the meager supply of books in my aunt's cabinet and have deemed to read a Danielle Steel novel (who I really don't like even then) because of lack of other books, I bought The Hobbit. I read it and I fell in love. It started my romance with epic fantasies, the genre of books which for me is the greatest of them all. It takes great imagination to envision a world, a country, a land with such intricate stories that even when read a thousand times over by different people, will still hold magic among the pages.