The word limit feels really restricting, like how a claustrophobic would feel in a confined, dark room. Suffocating.
But it's not all bad. Still, I decided to rumble mumble jumble my thoughts here.
My thought process is currently a bit incoherent, so bear with me here.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sort of "forced" me to read a book by John Green.
I was at that time still totally in love with dystopian books, and had just finished reading the Divergent series, and was still utterly crushing (is that even right?) on the main guy character, Four.
And she said, I can't say I quote because she didn't actually say it in English, but meh, I'll just use I quote anyway, "read this book before you start reading any other books". And that she had this huge crush on Augustus Waters, the main guy character.
The fact that these people are fictitious isn't really a barrier.
You know, it's not easy to find a book that can actually absorb you into the realm of, well, the book. At least not for me. So once I get in, I tend to either fall in love with the scene, the genre, the main character, the theme, or simply in love with...it.
And I know a lot of people do, too. Ok. Whatever.
So I read it. You know, The Fault in Our Stars.The one my friend force-recommended. (I mean, I didn't even know who John Green is). I hope I'm not giving out any spoilers here. I don't know if I should use the spoiler alert, because it won't really be a spoiler. But it will be kind of a spoiler. Or maybe not. Ok, so I'll just put in a small SPOILER ALERT here.
Anyway.
After reading it the first time, I was all "Ok. So it's a book about cancer. Sort of."
But being a science major, there are some things that I don't really understand in this book (I was trying REALLY hard not to diagnose Hazel's dyspnea, like is it a pleural effusion or a pulmonary edema. In the end I decided it's a pleural effusion because of the thoracocentesis and stuff. I mean, I would've suggested pleurodesis, but yeah, not my call).
But (again) being a person who took English Literature course back in school, I have all these questions that I needed answers to. Nothing like Hazel's, though. I mean, I agree with JG that all characters cease to exist once a novel is done. So far.
So I read it the second time. Conclusion: it's still a book about cancer.
The third time, however, I decided to have someone else read it to me. Maybe something will change this time. So I listened to an audiobook. Which is a lot faster.
Conclusion: it's not so much a book about cancer as it is about life itself. I mean, even if you don't have cancer, there are still some things you can relate to, that give you sense of things and life and all.
But I was left, with even more questions.
The theme of the book isn't really what I want to write about. Actually there's a lot of things I want to write about. But let's me just write about one of them, for now.
Somewhere in the book, JG wrote about who the real heroes are. I'm just going to paraphrase here. He said that the real heroes are the people who notice things, who observe keenly, who pay attention. Mainly because the universe wants to be observed. Not the people who do things.
I agree with him, partly. The observing part, yeah. The not doing things part, not really.
Observation really is a powerful ability granted to a person. You can learn a lot through observation.
With just observation, you can already get a part of a patient's diagnosis.
With just observation, you can tell just how much the patient is tolerating or suffering.
With just observation, you can tell how much benefit you want to give to the doubt you have about it.
I was once in the hospital, in my third year of med school, the doctor asked, even before we could do the patient interview, what the patient had.
We just started Internal Medicine, so we thought it was a really hard task. We didn't know how to observe (the patient was deaf in one ear, by the way. And he had a hearing aid. Which shouldn't be hard to recognize. But we didn't. Because we thought he was expecting us to see some more sophisticated things).
"Street diagnosis" he would call it. And he really emphasized on that.
Recently, I haven't really been living in the "now" part of time. I've been too eager to look ahead.
Sure, it's good. But losing the now part for the whatever it is to come, is it really worth it?
Sometimes we're too caught up in the future, we forget to enjoy the now. And once we're in the future, we feel bad for not cherishing the now.
I don't know. But I think observing the things around me, everything, anything, really gives me the sense of now. It sort of ties me back to the present.
One room at a time, yeah?
Wow. This is really long.
So here's a song for you.
I am currently obsessing over this song.
The first time I listened to it, the early part, I was all "come on! Why is this song so slow? Where's the energy?!"
Then came this part, where I was like "woahhh, this is what I've been waiting for. You still haven't failed to amaze me FJ. Awesome!"
So here it is; Terbang Tunduk by Fynn Jamal.
Can't find the original version. Heh. Jangan komplen banyak lah.
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
- John Green -
ps: Finals. Again?
ps2: A friend of mine just gave birth to a baby boy. And I can't can't can't CAN'T wait to see him *big grin*
