2025-10-21 Journal Entry

Writing writing words words. These word of the day prompts are fun, but sometimes I wonder how much I would use them. I won’t type them here yet, because I want to use them in context, but one has a very specific usage, and the other I’d almost just rather use something like “other-ness”, if only because that’s more often what would come into my mind, and the usage of that word instead doesn’t feel like it would really add to the content of my writing. But what do I know? Perhaps there will come a day where it will be intensely valuable.

I’m counting down the days to the wedding. And by that I mean: I drive down in two days! It will mostly be chill I think, but still. Strange. And then I’ll be off to Vietnam. My life is so strange and ephemeral these days, in a good away. I’m in Florida one day, in Hanoi the next. Caroline and Bradley are trying to convince me to go to Denmark with them for a few days in December. (I’m perhaps slightly less sold on that one, just because northern Europe in the dead of winter will be cold. Also, I mean they did extend the invitation casually but I really don’t want to bomb their trip, so unless it gets brought up again, I’ll probably just let a sleeping dog lie. It’s Bradley’s graduation trip with his wife – I doubt he wants his brother-in-law tagging along. But who am I to say.)

I’m over the halfway point now in Cloud Atlas, and truthfully this sort of “apex” chapter is kinda grating in its style. The alterity of the whole thing makes it exceptionally difficult to read, almost like reading the accents in a Faulkner novel. There’s certainly some argument to be made about writing in a way that conveys what a character’s accent sounds like, and certainly we shouldn’t all have “standard English” accents, but sittin’ ’ere readin’ words wi’ ‘bout a thousan’ diacri’ics an’ ‘postrophes is pretty exceptionally difficult. That may give you some sense of what it would sound like to be that guy, but god dammit if reading that way for a few hours isn’t making my head hurt. I’m also convinced I’d be done with that section already if I didn’t have to parse out every single word. Perhaps it really is a Faulkner-esque stroke of genius or something, and I like everything else about it (it’s a fun full-circle moment where another foreigner tries to integrate into a Polynesian island like the first guy, and it’s almost like a mirror of how missionaries originally came to Hawai’i. Plus there’s plenty of strange etymology in that section about new words for “baby” or “bitch” etc. getting made up), but it just makes my head hurt to stare at a page with so many god-damned apostrophes. I’ll take sparseness instead. (What would a book filled with a ton of punctuation look like? Ugh, it kinda makes me sick.)

Um, what else? While I’m reading The Tatami Galaxy, I always wonder what it would be like to read that book without having seen the show. I have a feeling many parts of it really wouldn’t make sense, because the sense of time in every section is extremely confusing. Which parts are flashbacks, which parts come after others, is almost impossible to really figure out. A lot of times, the main character will, say, see Akashi at one event, think back to the first time he met her, then something will happen in the present moment to interrupt his thought, then a bunch of time will go by before he finishes the thought he had before. I think I generally get it because I know the overall arc of the whole book, but still. Another aspect of it that I really didn’t know before is that he essentially “gets the girl” in the first run-through of his college career, so I don’t really understand why he’s so intent on reimagining his college career when at the end of this first section, Akashi wants to see his film and they agree to get dinner together. My recollection of the TV show is that Ozu is standing on the railing of the bridge because he’s being chased by a mob for being a cross-dresser or whatever and that distracts Akashi from going out with the MC. And that’s the whole reason he lives college all over again: he wants to imagine the right run-through that gets him what he desires, and it’s not until he recurses through the tatami galaxy that he sees them all as equally valid vehicles in which he blocks himself from doing anything. Anyways, we’ll see how it plays out!