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Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett - Book Review

  When I was in elementary school, I read a book called 'Loser' by Jerry Spinelli. It was about a boy about the same age as I was, named Zinkoff (his last name), and he basically was a klutz, couldn't do anything right, and other kids made fun of him. But one defining night, he finds out that Claudia, who I think was his neighbour's daughter?, went missing in the winter dark. Zinkoff goes to find her all alone, amid the police sirens wailing,which he assumes are part of a search party for Claudia. Though it turns out that she had already been rescued hours ago, and that the search party was for him; a real klutz through and through. But the book ends with him being able to size up a bully during recess, and actually winning his respect, or something like that. It's a good old heartwarming story of how even a 'loser' can be a hero in his own sense. Interestingly and yet probably understandably, I kept thinking about this book when I was reading the Three Nove...

French

 I started learning French again. I had been doing things like trying to write in my journal in French for a bit, learn some vocab, try some speaking exercises. But then pretty much a whole year passed without me getting like, even decently proficient at the language. Honestly, don't know how far I'll get in this time around either. I think I have a lot of time on my hands, and this is something I've really wanted to try, which is why I'm doing it. That, and I think I have a better understanding of what I need to do this time around. I read 'Fluent Forever', and at least for the time being I'm looking to stick to this path. To get to the reason why I started learning French, I have to start from talking about some other books I've been reading lately. I was reading 'A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy', and this other book by Hiroyuki, a popular internet celebrity on Japan, about his theory of effective time management. I don...

Me and Earl and The Dying Girl

So I just watched 'Five Feet Apart', and I had this real yearning to write about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.  And I mean Five Feet Apart wasn't even a bad movie. I don't watch a lot of medical drama movies, but this one felt kind of pretty deceiving in that regard. Like really, no one dies at the end, after all that mouth to mouth action? And how long is that night where someone can start to sleep, witness a death, contemplate it, decide to sneak off 2 miles away, go skating for a bit, get lung surgery, prepare an illumination show, and still have it be pitch black outside?  But really it made me think about the realness of death. That as a viewer of 'Five Feet Apart', I don't know if you ever feel threatened by this impending doom of death. You see a girl drown, come back to life, get surgery, sob uncontrollably just minutes after she wakes up from surgery, and no consequences. I mean Stella's best friend Po dies, and she's ready to go see light...

Gravity

 Watched Gravity just now, after I remembered how much I loved the movie. It's still amazing. I don't think I have a whole lot to say about this movie, but a few things. George Clooney is so great on this. The sense of humour pervades, and that sense of sanity. When I watched this the first few times, I remember being really moved by the part where Sandra Bullock is imagining Clooney finding her on the ship. It ended up not being as crazy of a scene as I thought it was prior (crazy as in like, I would always be so insanely moved at that scene), but still hits heavy. Rather, I found myself focused on how Bullock's character changes. How she picks up the mannerisms of Matt, with the humour. Also how Matt still walks Bullock through getting her into the pod (whatever it's called) for her to get to the ISS, even when he's drifting away in space, knowing he's left to die. It was pretty interesting. The dynamics of death that work so so differently in that dynamic. Be...

Blue Is The Warmest Color

 Just finished watching 'Blue is the warmest color', and found myself having a lot of thoughts about the movie, so I thought I would write one of these again.   I initially picked the movie out because I've been trying to study French, and when I was looking for popular French movies this topped off the lists I was looking at.  So I thought I'd give it a try.   Coming into the movie, I knew that it was made in 2013, and that it centered around a lesbian romance.  The latter part made it a controversial movie, according to some of the things I was reading randomly from Google.  I thought to myself, well maybe because it's from 2013?  I couldn't really imagine anyone calling a movie about love that's not heterosexual 'controversial' in 2021, so that was my interpretation.  And that was all I really knew about it.   And because my understanding of this movie beforehand was really limited as shown above, I was almost completely exp...

DFW's "E Unibus Pluram"

Happy New Year.  Kinda got rocked with the news on MF DOOM's death, which was a sour start to the year, but otherwise we're still kicking.   I thought it would be interesting to look at David Foster Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram" today.  Mostly because I watched some short clip about DFW and his essay on The Oscars, and some dude brought it up, and I was like oh God not this again.   Background So a little background info: I used to be a huge DFW fan when I was in college.  Read a lot of his stuff, Infinite Jest (of course) (if I've already written this in some other blog post and I'm being that guy I'm going to hang myself), and his other small essays, including E Unibus Pluram .  What I remember from reading it way back then was just this feeling of like, oh my God you're so right Mr. Wallace!  Just his dick straight hanging in my mouth.  The word play!  Oh the humorous irony!  I hate using the word "seductive" to describe...

Things I would tell myself as a beginner lifter

Definitely unrelated but I realized my post on The Book Club had like 50 something hits, unlike the other posts that have like 3 at most.  Do TBC fans read Blogger?  Had no idea lol.  Anyways.   I haven't written much on anything lately so I thought it might be fun to do a write up on things I would tell myself if I could go back in time and talk to beginner lifter me.  Probably back when I was 16 and had no idea what I was doing.  Or maybe when I was 14 and was forced to touch weights when I didn't want to.   A couple reasons why I wanted to do this.  One is because I always see other people making videos about this on YouTube, most recently the Eoin Murphy video I watched about it on the Sika Strength channel which was pretty eye-opening.  Also the ones the girls make about their "fitness journey".  But so yeah I thought it could be fun.  But also another bigger reason is, I see myself thinking, what would it be like to ...