a dream is an answer to a question you haven’t asked..

How beautiful yet sad.

Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.

“This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.”

“And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.”

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves - just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.”

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.

Read the rest of the story here..

– From The Elephant Vanishes (1993), On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning by Haruki Murakami

I found it from viewing one blog then another and another. The beauty of the internet.

I currently own only Vintage Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the world and Sputnik Sweetheart. I don’t mind getting more of his books for my birthday, esp. the Elephant Vanishes. *hint* *hint*

Want to read more?

Last saturday John was part of a dance event called SPOTlight 2K6. The club he was part of, U of T Dance Club, has a minimal role but he invited us to come see it anyways. Quy had a friend who was also performing so he went to go see it instead of going to the Animenorth convention.

This is his summation of the event:

Lol. Quy, you are brutal. But hilarious hahahaha.

Last few days i’ve managed to get in touch with old highschool friends. I have to admit I have a number of circles of friends. Maan belongs to one circle, while my core HS friends belonged to another. My CAT friends was another circle, and my notorious star section friends is one boatload of crazy people.

My core group consisted of 5 other people. Edlyn (now an architect), Nins (call-center girl), Car (a registered teacher), Age (no idea where she is) and Nalynn (the defunct best friend). Edlyn aka Ed and I got to talking on YM. Nina lost her dad more than a month ago to a stroke. I seem to be in a habit of getting late news, but I sent my regards. I’ve told Ed what’s been up the last few months and she’s shared the news with my other HS friends when they got together.

Today I got to talk to Car on YM. In the core group, I think Car is the sweetest at the same time most gullible amongst us. Her heart’s too soft. She was also my walking phone directory back in highschool. I was never good at remember phone numbers but I only had to remember hers and she would hook me up with anybody I need to contact. Lol. It’s still like old times, I’m thinking of giving her a call this sunday.

Yesterday I got to talk to Dean. Dean and I drifted apart because I was too distracted to call him up for the past years. Dean went to community college with Bryan, so they knew each other from school. First time I went to visit Bry, I got to surprise Dean when he showed up to return a book. Dean called in sick at work that day and we went out for Japanese. One time Dean complained to Bry that I never call him anymore. Bry didn’t seem to like how it came out and Dean ended up calling him “nasty”. I never heard Bry mention ever talking to Dean again. But Dean and I are talking again, much to his surprise that I am single again. But he said “ahhh.. no wonder you’re talking to me again. You’re no longer busy.” Hah. Asshole. I missed you too, old friend.

I’m just happy my old friends are doing well despite whatever life throws at them. I hope to see them soon, real soon. Ok, Dean’s relatively close so it just all depends when he’s going to NY. Shoppinggg!!!

This is gonna be one expensive year. Can somebody give me a winning lottery ticket please?

Simple Kind Of Life - No Doubt

For a long time I was in love
Not only in love, I was obsessed
With a friendship that no one else could touch
It didn’t work out, I’m covered in shells

And all I wanted was the simple things
A simple kind of life
And all I needed was a simple man
So I could be a wife

I’m so ashamed, I’ve been so mean
I don’t know how it got to this point
I always was the one with all the love
You came along, I’m hunting you down

Like a sick domestic abuser looking for a fight
And all I wanted was the simple things
A simple kind of life

If we met tomorrow for the very first time
Would it start all over again?
Would I try to make you mine?

I always thought I’d be a mom
Sometimes I wish for a mistake
The longer that I wait the more selfish that I get
You seem like you’d be a good dad

Now all those simple things are simply too complicated for my life
How’d I get so faithful to my freedom?
A selfish kind of life
When all I ever wanted was the simple things
A simple kind of life

.. is wherever your friends are ….

The weekend has been greatly exhausting. This has been our first official sunny weekend so my friends and I made the most of it.

I slept over at Louie’s place last friday because we planned to go to Centre Island early next morn. We prepped for the next day, skewered the bbq and chilled afterwards. John slept over and took dominion of the couch while I bunked on Louie’s pull out.

Saturday was a beautiful day. Abs camera died that day when Mhe accidentally dropped the bag with camera, breaking the plastic hinge that holds the batteries. Goodbye olympus!

I took some pics with my phone, smart person over here forgot her camera. Pardon the low quality pics but Centre Island is still a great place. You can’t imagine that it’s still part of Toronto. In my head, I ran a list of people I wished I could share the scenery with. The shore and pier reminded me of places I’ve been to recently. Slight tug on the heart that I consciously tucked away. I said to myself that that day will be a good day for me. And it was more than good. It was a great day.

I’ve been looking forward to blogging about our Centre Island day but my mind is just going on slow-mo from lack of sleep, so I shall write about it gen tom. For now, just check out the pics.

I haven’t been in the mall in a while so last saturday I went window shopping with my friends. We met up at the Apple store in Eaton’s where Mhe showed off her mixing prowess using the ipod mixer. She might not look like but there was a time Mhe’s get-up was very hiphop. As soon as Mhe left the station some guy tried to show off with the mixer too, but he didn’t do too well.

Because Louie and I had to run to the bank first, Abs and Mhe agreed to meet up with us when we get back from the bank. When we got back, they were untraceable so Louie and I went to Banana Republic where we got the soften cotton tops ever. I love banrep and contrary to popular belief, you can get great finds like $20 tops and $30 jeans. I’m not kidding!

When the four of us finally got together we headed to Danier (pronounced as dah-knee-yey, the french way as Belle insisted) where I succumbed to my pining for a bomber jacket I’ve been looking at for the longest time. There goes my advance happy birthday gift to myself. I had to get it altered since the sleeves are too long for my short arms, lol.

After that purchase I wasn’t planning to spend any more money. But the next day I ended up buying 2 extra-firm Ralph Lauren pillows from Winners for $16.99 each! So now I have 7 pillows on my bed. Yes you read that right, 7! I’ll probably donate a pillow to belle or just bring it to my granny’s room in the basement.

Since there wasn’t anything good on the tube, the duo no. 1 and I went to Vaughan Mills. I should’ve bought those damn pointy shoes from Nine West. *sigh* I was good today and ended up buying $19.99 jeans for myself and a $19.99 top for Maan’s bro (to send back home) from Esprit de Corps. That’s an awesome deal.

We haven’t been to Vaughan Mills for at least a month and we found a lot of new stores have opened. There is now a Lacoste Outlet (*gasp* I know!), an Oakley’s store and a Calvin Klein Underwear Outlet which oddly enough only had men inside the store. We only managed to go around half the mall and we pretty much skimmed through the stores we were relatively interested in. The Holt Renfew outlet didn’t have any interesting shoes in my size, nor did I find anything in Benetton.

Financially speaking I’m in the red but after all that’s happened in the past month, I think I need to reward myself with some splurging. The great thing about being single is now I don’t really have to entertain my compulsions to buy anything for him. I might not have bought him anything big except for a Nintendo game cube but all the small things pile up. I still remember using my entire first paycheque from Humber to buy the bloke a watch because he gave me his watch in the hopes of curbing my always-late habit. Not like it helped really, even for exams sometimes I was an hour late, ask Louie. During my stay at Humber College, I was bestowed by my instructors the nickname “trouble“. And I was trouble, for varying reasons. Lol.

Ahh no more splurging. Must save money for my champagne birthday. I think Belle and Alan are heading to Montreal to hook up with a childhood friend of ours, Ish. If everything pulls through, she’s gonna be in Montreal for the F1 race. As much as I want to see her, a trip to Montreal before my birthday just isn’t in the cards. My april paycheque wasn’t much because of all the work days I missed when I took off for my short-notice trip. Sigh. Looking back, that was just so rash of me. Now I’m broke and single. I guess life could be worse, eh?

It’s not that bad. It could’ve been worse in so many ways. But life is better now. I’m not there yet, but I will be in due time.

I’ve been online since 1996. I’ve had my own website since 2002, moved hostings from tripod (us & uk), several dedicated servers and at least 2 paid web hostings. I’ve owned 2 domain names, the first of which I forgot to renew thus I moved to dejibu.net.

I’ve had at least 10 email addresses, of which only 4 remain active and in usage. I’ve registered in countless bulletin boards and services of which I hardly remember ever using. I use primarly 2 passwords for everything I signed up for, so if you remember one you can pretty much screw with my accounts, including paypal which I use for my ebay purchases.

The first blog I actually maintained was one static html one that I had to manually update using macromedia dreamweaver. The next version, dejibu v 3.0 used a content management system I wrote in php and used a mysql db. That lasted for a while until I decided to overhaul things and go with wordpress. If you know how lazy/busy I am, wordpress for me is like a tv dinner: heat and ready to eat. Customizing nor implementing or writing plugins for it is no big feat for me, after all I am a web programmer. Shame on me for not being able to practice my skills at least.

Anyhow, when the last server I had went down, I decided to just use wordpress for my blog and portfolio. I didn’t really have time to play with it til later on. Besides I am lazy why on earth would I want to keep on tweaking it when most of the time people just want to read my ramblings or see my pics?

Since I got into to blogging, the number of active and inactive blogs I have kept growing. Because of the last server downtime, I was kinda “homeless” so I used friendster’s blog. Because I wanted to be able to leave comments on weswie’s blog and jilen’s photoblog, I signed up at blogger. To get my akismet key I had to sign up at wordpress. To hook up with jebbs, I signed up for a multiply account. To leave comments on jilen’s other blog, I signed up for another account (which I will not mention because a sappy blog is tied to it).

So many accounts, so many things to track. And the chronic problem of forgetting which email/username for what, and what password you used, if you can’t remember it you create another account. And it goes on and on.

Emails accounts offer bigger inbox limits. At the same time the number of email forwards and spam grows. A vicious cycle that gets temporarily resolves by bigger inboxes and more email accounts.

I’ve quit signing up for any more friendster wanna-be circles like hi5 and what not. Don’t bother sending me any more invitations because unless I really really really like you, I am not signing up. Please don’t send anymore crap my way. Save us all the trouble of inviting more gullible people to sign up and waste more hard-drive space somewhere just so you can build another blog.

I have to admit, I am a sucker for certain tv shows. I go home early to watch my weekly dose of House, CSI and Smallville. As for reality tv, I’m not a big fan of Survivor any more but I do love Amazing Race. And for entertainment shows, I watch american idol, canadian idol and so you think you can dance.

Today marks the end of another American Idol season. The crazy old man Taylor Hicks is the new American Idol. At the start of the season, I was rooting for the crazy man or the crazy girl McPhee. I like Hicks because he was very different, very anti-norm and an individual. Crazy to boot. Americans love their entertaining crazy idols.

The finale was graced by performances by Mary J. Blige, Toni Braxton, Meatloaf and Clay Aiken to name a few. Prince did a lovely number that reminded me to give his album another listening to tomorrow at work. Clay Aiken has gained weight and earned a few points of hotness despite him being positively gay.

Ahhh.. One less show to come home for. More nights out to be spent on mingling and drinking!

Crazy by Gnarls Barkley
I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions had an echo
In so much space

And when you’re out there
Without care,
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough
I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy
Does that make me crazy
Does that make me crazy
Possibly

And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice
That’s my only advice

Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are
Ha ha ha bless your soul
You really think you’re in control

Well, I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
Just like me

My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb
And all I remember Is thinking, I want to be like them
Ever since I was little, ever since I was little it only looked like fun
And it’s no coincidence I’ve come
And I can die when I’m done

But maybe I’m crazy
Maybe you’re crazy
Maybe we’re crazy
Probably