the rain smells of berries.

it rained in the evening, a gray musky rain. its smell had a sweetness, like preserved berries, that was very strong. i finished reading 'everything is illuminated' by jonathan safran foer in the chair by the window, then went to sleep in the evening. it was a very milky day, the day in which time swirls around and you sense much but nothing much really happens. and there was a mild sadness to it, the kind of sadness that goes with finishing a good book perhaps. whenever i flip towards the end of a good book i want to turn it the other way around and continue reading backwards, but it is never the same, never as fresh and crisp, nor as moving. there is only one way forward, and i guess that is somewhat like life. even if i were given a chance to revert time and let the sand rise up the hourglass i think i would not, because there are too many 'what ifs' to live through after that, the consequences of my limitations, my imperfect human-ness involved in making that one choice.

sometimes i feel like i wander too much through the past, most of which are haunting and make me cringe, very few happy moments. like in safran's book- "why are the painful things always electromagnets?"
i do not like being shouted at. like how collected my pay yesterday at fosters, and met johnny, the fierce manager, he railed at me for coming on and off, when just last sunday i told my friends that they were very nice people cos they told me 'just tell us when you're free, then we can schedule you in', but that was just a bluff. a front of niceness because they are in the service line and are oh-so-naturally hospitable to every one, they stab you with a smile. i am stabbed, i recoil, and i don't want to have anything to do with them. haha.

.excerpts from everything is illuminated.

"she undressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, i dont love you."

"i used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now i think it's the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world."

and i think that is true. i remember laughing that one time the rain poured down suddenly, i was in white on my way to church and was drenched through. i laughed my way running to the bus-stop for shelter, and couldn't stop laughing, thinking how fitting it was for a comedy, tragi-comedy.. and now i think it was my way of taking things lightly, of disengaging myself from the reality of this world, and making everything seem smaller than it is, and if that is not a way of 'shrinking from this wonderful and terrible world', then what is?