Today has been a rather uneventful day. I had been going through a lot of discomfort lately. I woke up with quite a few insect bites on my body, and I think my scalp is a little allergic to the shampoo that I'd been using lately. My body has been itching for quite a few days now, and the scratching isn't making things improve any more than it already is. Hopefully things should return to normal in a few days. Could this have anything to do with my diet? After all, my diet has also been rather inconsistent in the past few days. I really feel like making some food for myself once for a while, but for some strange reason I simply cannot get myself down to the kitchen and actually make food.

I think my life has been quite empty for the past few weeks (for as long as I can remember, to be precise, since this holiday has been going on for quite a while) and my days are beginning to melt into each other. Fragments of my memories are beginning to disintegrate and mingle with one another, and I cannot remember what I did a week ago since every single day feels identical. It feels as if that I am merely drifting through the hours of my life, aimlessly wandering through the minutes that tick by, until night falls and my body descends into a deep sleep. Yet, there is something comforting about how expectable my life has come to be, how one day is the same as another, how the concept of eternity, at least for this very instant, appears very real. This piece of writing, I think, is just one of those attempts to keep track of time and to make sure that my thinking self is still alive, that time still serves any purpose when things are just the same. It's a bit like how the prisoner would scratch lines into the wall to keep track of the days that he had been imprisoned – until the day that he realizes that keeping track of time serves no purpose other than reminding him that every passing day will be the same regardless.

I had been talking to myself a lot lately. I think I must be going insane, because my conscience tells me that deep inside, I am a social being. Perhaps, in my writing and in my thoughts, I have labelled myself as an individual who can do without the companionship of other humans, but I think I am wrong. Having a conversation with myself is actually quite a pleasurable process, I think, since I stutter quite a lot in public, and words do not come out in the way that I want them to come out as. I think I must have offended a lot of people in public, even though I did not mean to say such things in such ways. Yet I am an incredibly articulate individual when I converse with myself, since my language does not come out in words but in mere thoughts, and as a result those thoughts are invariably flawless in their construction. The pleasure of thinking is mostly a harmless, hedonistic activity, though I can understand why some people consider people who talk to themselves as 'insane'. The thinker and the insane are really not that different.

I think this year is going to be quite eventful. I'm probably going to go overseas, not once, but twice. Once in April and once in December, to be precise. Mother told me that my grandfather is suffering from a terminal illness, and that he would probably die very soon. I think that he has died quite a while ago actually, since he is in a coma and his consciousness has long ago departed him, leaving behind only flesh and blood which, despite the absence of his consciousness, continues to live on as a testament of the human's innate will to survive. In any case, I am quite excited that I would be going overseas, since I would like to see him one last time and think about the memories that I shared with him and his family and those he loved and those he hated. He is just one of the countless individuals who have died or are dying as we speak. No more, no less.

That's about it for today. There's not too much that's going on at the moment and things wouldn't be any more eventful than how things already are. I would really like to play the piano downstairs once in a while, as well, but I'm too lazy to do that and I've been incredibly guilty for neglecting music for such a long time. I never knew that a mere piano would be capable of inflicting such torment.  

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.

The past few days have been quite hot and humid, and my room has become a life-sized oven, where I lay slumped in front of the computer, getting basted by hot air with every passing moment. It feels as if that mold is about to grow from the walls of my room and I had been rather uncomfortable for the past couple of days. It is quite cloudy outside, though the incessant chirping of cicadas suggest that there will be no more rain for a while. It does not matter too much though, because the weather outside does not really bother someone who is going to be in his room for the majority of his summer break.

The past couple of posts haven't been very good. I read and re-read those posts and decided that they were not particularly well-written or thought-out, though I did appreciate the composition of certain passages that, I think, have been worth the amount of time I had been spending consciously composing them in my spare moments. In retrospect, my earliest posts were awful. To be precise, I wished that I had not been the kind of person that I had been a year ago, and as I am writing down this sentence I am contemplating whether I should delete them from this journal, forever. I absolutely loathe the individual I was back then, and my heart is full of regrets for even having written down such putrid nonsense. There is definitely a sense of self-loathing going on here, but I consider this a very natural thing to happen to someone of my age. To be precise, I feel much better about myself now compared to the person I was before, and I don't think I can be any happier than how I am right now. Perhaps a haircut could do a lot for me, but there's no need to worry about that right now, since it's raining again and inevitably I would be deterred from any outdoor activities for quite some time, I think.

I had been watching Smile Precure for the past week or so (I cannot remember when I first picked it up), and I think the show is quite wonderful. There is little doubt, of course, that the show was designed with small children in mind – to be precise, the show was designed to sell plastic toys to small children, though none of this has anything to do with my enjoyment of this wonderful series. As formulaic and repetitive magical girl anime tend to be, they remain uplifting, cheerful and at times, quite humorous. My favourite girl is Yayoi. I really enjoy watching her cry ('sobbing' might be the most appropriate word here, since she rarely cries for a reason other than crying for the sake of doing so). I absolutely adore her cutesy antics. I like how she would hold her sketchbook in front of her chest and she would be knocking her knees together because of how embarrassed she was. I would love to pinch her cheeks if she was real. Oh, and I also love her sweater. I imagine that her sweater would have a really nice scent to it. I really like all the girls, actually, though I find Miyuki quite annoying at times (although she is the funniest one). That's my two cents on Yayoi. I think I must have some sort of infatuation with girls that have blonde hair. Crazy, I know.

This season's anime has been pretty good, actually. I don't really have much to say about Chuu2's ending. I don't think the ending can be considered mediocre, though I certainly did expect it and I honestly wished the show remained a comedy all the way through. A lot of the drama that revolved around Rikka's father was unnecessary, I think, because it felt as if KyoAni wanted to add drama for the sake of drama. Was KyoAni trying to make a 'realistic ending' to the show so that it'll end up with a life-lesson of some sorts? Maybe. In any case, I was rather disappointed with the ending, enough said.

There's not really too much to say, either, about Aikatsu and Girls und Panzer. Aikatsu was surprisingly realistic for an idol anime, and it seems they've put in extra effort to show that behind every successful idol lies hard work and determination. I absolutely love how the backgrounds were rendered, though, and I actually really like the character designs. The ED also had a really wonderful back-beat to it. Girls und Panzer is the unexpected gem of the season. Before I was into anime, I was into tanks and armoured vehicles and that sort of things. The show was really a dream come true and I enjoyed every episode. The last three episodes are going to be wonderful, I'm sure, but there's going to be a long wait till they air and I don't think I can wait that long.

I had a lot of awful things prepared for Urobuchi when I heard how others described Psycho-Pass as something that only Urobuchi would do. Psycho-Pass wasn't that bad, to be honest, and it was actually quite entertaining, though I'm sure Urubochi wanted his show to be thought-provoking and not merely a gore fest. I don't really know why we need another cyberpunk  anime, since the pinnacle of that genre ended with the whole Ghost in the Shell franchise, but I genuinely hope that Urobuchi would do a good job with the show.

There's honestly nothing else to say about everything I'm watching this season. They have all been disappointing (I'm only three episodes into Shinsekai Yori so I can't say if I like the show for certain) and I'd rather not waste my time here. So that's about it for today, take care, and I'll make sure I'll put up more worthless opinions next time.

Happy Birthday, Misuzu!