Hello Tim!
This week is the week of utter relaxation, for it’s the week of our precious spring break! To rejoice in this wondrous season, the sun is doing whatever he can to bring warmth and hotness to Taiwan, and though sometimes unbearable, it feels nice not to have any rain (so far)
The break starts from Wednesday and goes on all the way to Sunday. Due to this, I think I should divide the sections by the days so that it won’t get too confusing.
(a High chance that I had just given myself a giant workload on writing letters)
Contents of the Week
-Tuesday: The Five People You Meet in Heaven
-Wednesday: Two Books and Movie
-Thursday: Qingming Family Gathering
-Friday: Unceasing Script Typing
Tuesday: The Five People You Meet in Heaven
I put on Tuesday simply for two reasons, the first for the fact that I believe that I didn’t do well on the speech of gun control in the speech class, for I was talking too slowly and I passed the time limit by twenty seconds when I still have two paragraphs prepared if I weren’t forced to cut it short.
The other was for the book I finished on Tuesday (It is Thursday now, by the way) which also happen to be the book I promised that I’ll be talking about last week.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven, written by Mitch Albom, the author who wrote the well-known Tuesdays with Morrie. I got this book from my teacher, Villy, when she told me that she had a pile of books she was about to throw away. That was how fourteen more books are on my shelf, taking up the remaining spaces of it. Anyway, the book, according to Villy, is her favorite one in the pile she gave me, and when I finished Harry Potter before my mom and I went to Yilan, I brought this with me first.
The pages of the book are yellow with age, and harms like intentional folded pages and some edges are torn and flaky. I kept the folded pages and let the wrinkled pages be, for I want to keep it exactly how it is the moment I got it, and if there’s already a fault when I get it, let it be.
The novel took a leap for the readers from the first page, saying that the story will start with the death of the protagonist, Eddie. The omniscient narrator winded back several hours and started the countdown the perish of our eighty-something main character. The hook was there, big, shiny and obtrusive. Still yet, I willingly splashed out of the water and bit the hook nonetheless as I became absorbed with the plot.
Old Eddie was in heaven alright, but he was soon startled by a man he hardly knew, told about the “rules” of the kind of heaven he is in: When you die, you will meet five people who each has a lesson to teach.
This is a universe where heaven exists, where God exists and He was not just once implied to be present, but I think you don’t essentially have to believe in God or be religious to read this book; this is simply a book for everyone. In and out chapters, the time and space were constantly altering, the most recurring, with the “Today is Eddie’s Birthday” that tells us more about Eddie when he was 5, 6, 7, 17, 31, 51, 75, etc. Through the stories of the five people Eddie met, he learned that his life was not really as much a failure as he thought via the stories of sacrifice, of forgiveness, memory, and salvation, and the lesson that started all: Connection. The connection was the spine (the figurative one) of the book. It proved for numerous times how everyone in the world was so closely clasped together that no man is an island. I like the aspect of the book the most, and it portrayed both the sides of such connection, and the fascination was derived from the fact that it makes no difference to the rule of the world: “… each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.” This was indeed a moving book, one recommended by me.
I finished the book on the MRT, with another twenty minutes left until home, I was reliving the moments of the story, and when I got home, I had the next book in my hand already.
Wednesday: Two Books and Movie
It’s Saturday already. I will get to the reasons as we reach Friday.
On Tuesday night, I got a text from my buddy Henry, who asked me if I want to go to the movies with him. He wanted to watch one of the latest movies: Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg. I normally don’t watch sci-fi, but since it was an invitation from a friend, I seldom go with not obliging.
Ready Player One is a sci-fi in that focuses on the recently trending VR- Virtual Reality. Henry and I bought the tickets only as we arrived, so that left us with only the seats of the three rows in the very front; With the loud and thrumming sound effects, the actions were enticing. The movie also shows tributes to the pop cultures of the past, in which a lot of pop references to movies and videos can be found in the action-packed movie.
In the movie, though people are all inseparable with the VR technology, the protagonist still managed to convince the others not to neglect the connection between people in reality, in real life, for virtual reality, in essence, is far from reality.
After the movie, we parted as he was heading home, and as I was heading for my cousin Elizabeth’s. I planned to have a sleepover at her place.
Her biology test would be on Friday next week, so we didn’t have much interaction except our dinner pizza.
When she was studying biology, I was on the sofa in her living room reading the books I had brought.
I had no idea what’s gotten into me, but I finished three books in two days.
After I had finished ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ on Tuesday when on the metro, I grabbed the next book from my shelf the moment I hit home.
A novel in Chinese it was, it was not a translated one. ‘詩魂’ (literally translated as ‘Spirit of the Poems’), written by my favorite Taiwanese author, 陳郁如 (pronounced as Chen Yu Ru). The novel was a fantasy based on the poems written in the Tang Dynasty. I am not normally a fan of those poems, for they are so obscure and are more like hard nuts to crack, but when they are put into novels… It put me in a new perspective. The protagonist was a boy who was named after a Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty. He has a special ability which enables him to go into the world of a particular poem if he is able to memorize and recite the poem. The world of the poem looks like however it was described in the poems: The cherry blossoms, the silence of a solemn night, the lonesome poet walking by the river after getting exiled, etc.
The author had the story written in a fashion that kids would be familiar with and that adults would smile at reading. I had her debut novel already when I was in elementary school, and in fact, I also have the sequel to this ‘Spirit of the Poems’ in my shelf already, but I want to save it for another time.
I finished the first two-thirds of the book on Tuesday when I was at home, so I bought this book and another book with me, in case I finished with no books to read.
Turned out that one and a half books weren’t enough for me.
The other book I brought with me was Matilda by Roald Dahl, a book I bet eight percent of people in my class know about.
A few years ago, when I was still not very accustomed to reading everything in English, my cram school teacher had already showed the movie to us. A genius naïve little girl who has humungous brainpower with neglecting parents. Miraculous superpowers. A homeroom teacher with a kind heart but a tragic backstory. A mean supervisor with an awful name who hates children in general. It was not exactly a lengthy book, and since it was a novel for youth, so though enjoyable, it didn’t take me much time to finish reading. I texted my mom if she could bring another book for me tomorrow (which is Thursday) since she and we were both visiting my uncle for lunch.
Thursday: Qingming Family Gathering
In the morning, I went to my uncle’s house early because my mom told me to do so and Elizabeth had to go have math lessons first (poor her). It was about twenty minutes of walking distance, so I sauntered over at a relatively slow pace.
It was still technically Tomb Sweeping Day, even though we did that last week, and the purpose we had for visiting our uncle’s was to pay our regards to the shrines of my grandparents in his house, and also for a family lunch.
I had to leave early though, for I had a meeting with Eric, my German teacher, who was going to help me with the practice of the German reading-out competition that would take place on the next Tuesday (kind of anxious was I). We agreed to meet at his apartment at two in the afternoon. I had five articles to practice, and I believe I would have to do a lucky draw to determine which article I would be reading at the competition. It wasn’t until half past six until I left his house. It was very extenuating, cramming the newly learned vocabulary and the pronunciation, the intonations and the pauses of five pieces of articles written in five different styles, different purposes. There was an article about beauty models in Germany, one about a tired and hungry tiger on a bicycles, one on German people in cars, one discussing the differences between Freunde (friends), Bekannter (acquaintances), Kollege (colleagues), and Feinde (foes/ fiends) while the last one a story about a man stealing a fox’s meal. Pronunciation and intonation exempted, I still learned a lot just by reading these articles. Eric even sent me recordings of his reading of the articles, so that I would still be able to keep practicing after I got home. I love the fact that I was so lucky to have him and his wife (Villy) as my teachers. All the aids that they gave me, from this support to that, I could be safe to say that I wouldn’t be who I am now without them, however, they would always say that it was my own who made myself the ‘Me Myself’. True that I had the motivation, but a lot of it was derived from their love of teaching. I am truly grateful for them.
After I got home, I remembered that Allison reminded me to take a look at the play scripts of The Pillowman, the script we ultimately decided to play in our annual performance.
(Brace yourselves, this is where tragedy happens)
Summer told us that the script has to be in the format of Word Document. Upon hearing this, I thought it was alright since all we had to do is to copy the whole thing from the pdf format and in one click it would be on the Word page. No fuss.
Tsk, tsk, tsk…
No can do. In the pdf file of The Pillowman, they were only scanned pages from the original script, meaning they are like taken pictures instead of words you can copy and paste. Which means…
After an hour of fruitless search for some typed version of the script, I gave up and accepted the arrangement. I discussed with Aubrey and we decided to cut the script in half and each takes one half of it.
It has 104 pages in total.
I said to myself, ‘Well, that means no sleep today, Mister.’
But I could barely focus on anything when I only got to one in the morning. I kept typing the wrong sentence, clicking the wrong letter on the keyboard, and that was when I decided that it wouldn’t do any good. Finished ten pages. 42 more to go.
Friday: Unceasing Script Typing
I slept in until ten in the morning, and since mom was leaving to have lunch with her middle school friends, she forced me awake so that I wouldn’t sleep the whole day away.
I took the apple pie out of the oven (my mom heated it up when I was still sleeping. She’s the best.) and immediately picked up from where I left my work undone the day before.
It was a toil, being half-obligated to sit at the desk without standing up for rests every now and then. My back hurts (Thank you for telling me that you feel unwell, I am well informed, Back. Really, I really do.) And My arms were sore for locking their position for hours without changing posture. I tried sitting u[ as straight, and I was flying my hands across the keyboard as fast as I could (‘RIP Hugo’s keyboard,’ said Aubrey) but still it doesn’t feel like I was typing enough. It was already one in the afternoon when I checked the clock. Three hours of time was transferred into thousands of words. I was also reading the text while I was typing, and though I was typing ever so reluctantly, I kind of enjoyed the plot. The Pillowman (plot explaining time) was about a pair of brothers were arrested for the plots of the stories Katurian (one of the brothers) were closely matching the patterns of the recent cases of murders of children. Katurian and his brother Michal DID commit the crime, actually, and some of his stories were narrated or reenacted in certain parts of the play as they are very much related to the lives of the brothers. It was indeed, a play that would make the audience (at least, me) astounded and speechless. No matter how much workload I had, I had to go over to my Grandma’s (on my father’s side) Being pressured by the deadline, (which is the very same day) I not only brought my laptop with me but also typed when I was on the metro.
Using a laptop on the metro is not like using a cell phone on one; eighty percent of people use their cell phones on metros (while the other nineteen percent are either sleeping or chatting, leaving only one percent of people reading a physical book.) But you would have to bear dozens of pairs of burning gazes if you really use a laptop on the metro, for it would take up a lot of space and it was basically a bizarre sight. However, with the circumstances I was under, I don’t think I was allowed to have any doubts about what I was doing. If I had to type with one hand with another holding the laptop when standing, then so be it.
I arrived at my Grandma’s house at around two-thirty, and even then I did not take rests; I was too focused on getting the job done.
Another three hours passed, and then it was dinner time. I wolfed down my dinner and continued working. My uncle and aunt took Mom and I home at around eight in the evening. (Mom arrived at my Grandma’s in the late afternoon)
It was ten and a half o’clock when I finished with my 52 pages of original playscript, with 12328 words in total. It took me more or less ten hours, but I was finally there.
At least I had something to practice my typing with.
To be honest, two hours ago (Saturday) I was just worried if Aubrey would have trouble with HER 52 pages, for she was out the whole Friday, and she just said she was on a part-time job at some exhibition, and it turns out…
Thanks to the script, I had absolute no time to read much on my next novel, and I think it would save me with some words if I put the whole thing off to the next week’s letter.
Saturday/ Sunday: The Abrupt Halt
Today is Sunday in the evening, and I really do hope that I wouldn’t have to finish the letter here; I had to because today had been such a busy day that I went out at six thirty in the morning, and only having been back home just now.
I had to go work on my other homework.
Sorry but sincerely,
Hugo
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