Not too much has changed since my last blog post. It has been quite a long time, however, since I last wrote anything, and I feel slightly guilty for having neglected this place for all this time. After all, tertiary education will unleash its guaranteed payload of frustration and anxiety in about a month's time, and my quiet, lazy, carefree days in my room will soon come to an end. Such is reality.

The past few days have been filled with anxiety. One of my cats have died – we suspect that she died of a heart attack – and my family had been stricken by grief. To be precise, my mother had been wallowing in pain for the past few days, and watching her being in such a miserable state is, admittedly, a little annoying but also understandable, since she treats her pets with an attitude that is far more 'serious' than mine. I do not think I shed any tears during and after the incident (my mother, quite literally, cried a river). Hence, a lot of my sympathy actually went towards her rather than the cat. After all, the cat had died a painless death, under the summer sun as well, her body found in the serene shades of the garden foliage where she must have enjoyed her last moments before fate took her life. She had lived her life quite comfortably, without any worry or stress, which I think is in fact quite enviable. The transition from life to death, however, is always sudden, and while humans live in the present, we rarely think that the same could happen to us, that our consciousness will one day leave us as well, and that we, too, would one day disintegrate and return to the soil, to the dust of the earth where we were first conceived.

In any case, we held a simple funeral for her. Her body was wrapped in a blanket and her body laid into a small coffin, which in retrospect must have been a very cozy place to sleep in had she been alive to experience it. Then her body was laid into a pit freshly dug in the backyard, then the pit was covered with soil, and her grave then marked with a small wooden cross. I thought it was a burial most fitting for her. Just like the countless lives that have returned to the soil before her, she had also done the same, in the most perfect and painless fashion. I thought that it was a very privileged way to die.

A few more posters had been framed and fastened onto the walls of my bedroom. Two of them were portraits of Misuzu – one showing her relaxing under a tree, holding a small box of peach nectar, while the other shows her in an adorable bikini. I also ordered a very large poster showing Misuzu and Nagisa and Rin and Ayu, hand in hand, walking along the ocean. I thought they all looked very cute and adorable, though of course Misuzu is the most beautiful one. I think framed posters look a lot neater than wall scrolls or posters that are simply tacked onto the wall, though the right frames are indeed very hard to find.

I had just finished reading Narcissu 2, and my verdict is that it isn't very good, at least when compared to its predecessor. I felt that the writing, for the most part, is far too sentimental. Everything had been drowned in pointless sentimentality, and the lines read as if they are taken straight from a clichéd soap drama. For me, the success of Narcissu comes from its apathetic treatment of the theme of life and death, and constant turmoil that occurs between apathy and the value of human life. On one hand Setsumi finds life no longer worth living, and commits suicide. On the other, the story itself acts against the wishes of the protagonist, reflecting upon the fragility and, perhaps, life's worth, through constant anecdotes. In Narcissu 2, most of this is replaced by crying and more crying, particularly towards the end, and the link between the 'failures' of Christianity to save its believers, and a human's will to live (and die, for that matter), was not properly established to give the story a sense of unity. Some segments were quite well written, but the story as whole ended up being overly 'touchy', and there wasn't too much depth in the story, though admittedly it is very well-written for a tear jerker. Unfortunately I did not shed any tears, and the story was quite boring. It also could have been a lot shorter as the story became somewhat repetitive in the middle, though perhaps this was done on purpose to illustrate the mundane lives led by hospital patients.

(There are, however, two aspects to the novel which redeems its quality somewhat. First of all, the music is superb – emotional, sorrowful, and a little sentimental, but well composed nonetheless. Secondly, the character art had been very well drawn, though I think they look a bit too 'cute' for the novel's subject matter. I do have a bit of a soft spot for girls dressed in sailor uniforms or frilly dresses, unfortunately. You can't deny that Setsumi is absolutely adorable in every way).

There is not too much else to say. There are a few other things that had happened in the past few weeks, but I would really rather not talk about them. I have given up on a few things, which have made my life a bit more free and a tad happier, and I also feel like buying a few more figures to complete a part of my collection. Maybe I'll take a few photographs, maybe I wouldn't.  In any case, take care, and there should be a new post sometime next week.