word vomit
I just finished reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. I loved it. I'm not about to write a review of it, but I just wanted to write for the sake of releasing these weird feelings of... I don't even know. Melancholy? Shock? Joy?
A little back story:
I've been searching for a cheap copy of the book for some years now. It goes for around P600 (if I'm not mistaken) at Fully Booked (and presumably, in all the other commercial bookstores). It only occurred to me last week that I could borrow it from the Rizal Library. Which I did.
On Friday morning I found myself by my lonesome, what with all my friends at immersion and all (yeah, the few friends I had just had to go on immersion on the same day). It was the perfect time to get started on Norwegian Wood, but I had just finished Abundance of Katherines the night before and I didn't want to move on just yet. (I like to take breaks in between books to let the first one soak into my mind. It's sort of like when you eat something really delicious, and you want the taste to linger on your tongue for a while before indulging yourself on the next course.)
Eventually I did get around to reading a couple of pages, and in those couple of pages I had begun to really like the book. The writing was simple, but I really admired the way Murakami could tell a story out of seemingly mundane events, such as Toru hearing a Beatles song during an airplane flight. I was drawn, but not drawn enough to keep reading later than 12 PM.
On Saturday morning I had Physio. In a rush, I skipped breakfast and opted to buy some food at the Bellarmine cafeteria. I bought a turon.
Wrong move. Halfway through Doc GJ's lecture, there was a stabbing pain in my gut. It hurt like crazy, like my intestines had turned into barbed wire and were pressing against the walls of my body.
Long story short: About half an hour later, I was curled up on the benches of Bellarmine, two floors below my classroom, waiting for somebody to see me and take me to the infirmary. Having just spewed the contents of my stomach out into a sink in the ladies restroom, I felt weak and in no position to walk to the clinic myself.
I had been lying down for some fifteen minutes, thinking my agony was never going to end, when my friend Mike spotted me and calmly fetched the security guard, who radioed for the medic.
Soon enough, a small crowd of people (including a mom who told me, "Hindi ka kasi nagbreakfast") had gathered around me. I felt like an idiot for causing such a stir when I hadn't broken any limbs, hadn't severed my spinal cord, hadn't tripped and gored my eye on a rock, hadn't been struck by lightning. All I had was a tummyache. But wow, did it hurt.
I got to take the ambulance to the clinic. Wee! They didn't turn on the sirens or anything, but Rap told me later on that I should've asked them to. "Para sulit." Valid point. But at least I got to ride onto Red Brick Road!
The clinic staff seemed to have been expecting me to be wheeled in on a stretcher or a wheelchair because when I arrived, the door was wide open. But I casually strode up to the counter and explained my situation to the Doctora Umali. She took me to a curtained-off "room" in the clinic, where I got to lie down and writhe in agony on a soft mattress.
They told me that I had probably gotten food poisoning from the turon that I ate. In my mind I was going YOU DON'T SAY? but all that came out of my mouth was "ughrrrrmrmmmmmmhhh."
About an hour later, when the stabs in my stomach were coming farther and farther apart, my cousin, Kuya Jay, picked me up. He took me to my aunt's house to recover.
As it turned out, I could've stayed at the condo and I would've been fine. The stabbing stopped at around 2 pm, and I was free to read my novel in peace.
And that I did.
And that is the back story.
. . .
Right now my laptop's monitor seems to be busted. When I turn it on, weird colors just swirl around. The colors eventually fade into white, which eventually fades into black. It's really trippy. Now though, it's just black. No more color.
I've got nothing else to entertain myself with at the condo, which is why I got to finishing Norwegian Wood. Now I want to move on to The Great Gatsby but I still want to savor the aftertaste of Wood.
Oh yeah, the copy I borrowed from the lib has a lot of underlined sentences and paragraphs in them. Normally I hate it when people do that, but I found the underlines quite helpful. They made me stop and thinking about double-meanings and symbolisms in the text. Sort of like when Harry Potter used the Half-Blood Prince's book. Thank you, whoever you are!
Now I shall rest my eyes for a bit and think about the book some more.
A little back story:
I've been searching for a cheap copy of the book for some years now. It goes for around P600 (if I'm not mistaken) at Fully Booked (and presumably, in all the other commercial bookstores). It only occurred to me last week that I could borrow it from the Rizal Library. Which I did.
On Friday morning I found myself by my lonesome, what with all my friends at immersion and all (yeah, the few friends I had just had to go on immersion on the same day). It was the perfect time to get started on Norwegian Wood, but I had just finished Abundance of Katherines the night before and I didn't want to move on just yet. (I like to take breaks in between books to let the first one soak into my mind. It's sort of like when you eat something really delicious, and you want the taste to linger on your tongue for a while before indulging yourself on the next course.)
Eventually I did get around to reading a couple of pages, and in those couple of pages I had begun to really like the book. The writing was simple, but I really admired the way Murakami could tell a story out of seemingly mundane events, such as Toru hearing a Beatles song during an airplane flight. I was drawn, but not drawn enough to keep reading later than 12 PM.
On Saturday morning I had Physio. In a rush, I skipped breakfast and opted to buy some food at the Bellarmine cafeteria. I bought a turon.
Wrong move. Halfway through Doc GJ's lecture, there was a stabbing pain in my gut. It hurt like crazy, like my intestines had turned into barbed wire and were pressing against the walls of my body.
Long story short: About half an hour later, I was curled up on the benches of Bellarmine, two floors below my classroom, waiting for somebody to see me and take me to the infirmary. Having just spewed the contents of my stomach out into a sink in the ladies restroom, I felt weak and in no position to walk to the clinic myself.
I had been lying down for some fifteen minutes, thinking my agony was never going to end, when my friend Mike spotted me and calmly fetched the security guard, who radioed for the medic.
Soon enough, a small crowd of people (including a mom who told me, "Hindi ka kasi nagbreakfast") had gathered around me. I felt like an idiot for causing such a stir when I hadn't broken any limbs, hadn't severed my spinal cord, hadn't tripped and gored my eye on a rock, hadn't been struck by lightning. All I had was a tummyache. But wow, did it hurt.
I got to take the ambulance to the clinic. Wee! They didn't turn on the sirens or anything, but Rap told me later on that I should've asked them to. "Para sulit." Valid point. But at least I got to ride onto Red Brick Road!
The clinic staff seemed to have been expecting me to be wheeled in on a stretcher or a wheelchair because when I arrived, the door was wide open. But I casually strode up to the counter and explained my situation to the Doctora Umali. She took me to a curtained-off "room" in the clinic, where I got to lie down and writhe in agony on a soft mattress.
They told me that I had probably gotten food poisoning from the turon that I ate. In my mind I was going YOU DON'T SAY? but all that came out of my mouth was "ughrrrrmrmmmmmmhhh."
About an hour later, when the stabs in my stomach were coming farther and farther apart, my cousin, Kuya Jay, picked me up. He took me to my aunt's house to recover.
As it turned out, I could've stayed at the condo and I would've been fine. The stabbing stopped at around 2 pm, and I was free to read my novel in peace.
And that I did.
And that is the back story.
. . .
Right now my laptop's monitor seems to be busted. When I turn it on, weird colors just swirl around. The colors eventually fade into white, which eventually fades into black. It's really trippy. Now though, it's just black. No more color.
I've got nothing else to entertain myself with at the condo, which is why I got to finishing Norwegian Wood. Now I want to move on to The Great Gatsby but I still want to savor the aftertaste of Wood.
Oh yeah, the copy I borrowed from the lib has a lot of underlined sentences and paragraphs in them. Normally I hate it when people do that, but I found the underlines quite helpful. They made me stop and thinking about double-meanings and symbolisms in the text. Sort of like when Harry Potter used the Half-Blood Prince's book. Thank you, whoever you are!
Now I shall rest my eyes for a bit and think about the book some more.
Whew, glad everything worked out fine in the end. Thanks to God for letting Mike come to your rescue. Thanks too to everyone who helped.
ReplyDelete