Dour

Just as well, the old site had died on me and I was too knackered to want to try contacting my host to find out what went what wrong.

Just as well, because I was contemplating getting a fresh start to life or at least blogging. I felt stale and now, this is the best platform for me to try to regain a life that I lost.

Readership counts for nothing now, really, for me. I have lost track of who my real readers are and with the proliferation of spam comments on the old site, the rise in hit statistics looked extremely suspicious. Readers are important to me because I have formed friendships with some who actually desired to take the first step in unveiling the person behind the old place. Those were the days when I could still find reserves of inspiration from within, but somewhere along the way, something happened on the way to heaven.

I am now contemplating if I should just fade away quietly over at the old place or I should simply do the proper thing, i.e., to leave bits of information of this new place to those who were sticking with me, through the good times and the bad. Yet right now, the inclination is more towards fading away.

***

Probably around the same time when my blog started to die on me, I was wandering around Kino books, trying to see if they had the two books I wanted on sale. After a rather fruitless phone call I made to Borders to enquire on their availabilities, I was not actually very hopeful of the fact that Kino books had them as well. To cut a long story short, the very nice sales assistant whom I approached at the information counter made a few calls before telling me that their supplier did not have copies of the books on hand. So it is Borders 1 Kino 0, because the lady on the line from Borders told me that I could order the books (for an exorbitant price of course), which would take about 6 weeks to reach me.

I scrapped that intention of procuring the books locally and decided that while I had made reservations to borrow them from the library, I could also call on a colleague, who would be leaving for the States in the next few days to help me get the books, be it a fresh copy or second-hand.

That’s not really the end of the story.

I was still wandering around Kino books when I thought of the film “Crying Out Love, in the Centre of the World” and reckoned I might have more than a chance of acquiring the VCD or DVD version of it at Kino (since it was a Japanese film and Kino’s a Jap bookstore). Tried my luck again (this time at the Japanese book information counter) and asked for an English translation of the book.

The polite male sales assistant went off to check their database for a while before coming back to tell me that there was no English translation of this best-selling novel (with which the film was adapted from) but (hooray for the “but”), someone had already translated it into Chinese (traditional script, though) and this version was on sale in Kino.

The “better than nothing but this can actually be something” thought crept into my head and within moments, I clad, in my arms, the translated version of the novel, together with another novel (also translated into traditional Chinese) by the same author. The books did not cost a bomb and they were more therapeutic than anything else I experienced during a rather uneventful weekend.

Now, I have fresh inspiration to draw on in wanting to (a) finish the books (or at least one book) and (b) start the reading habit. Not since the days of me being a rabid Louis Cha fan that I have actually read something in Chinese (traditional version some more) and this will prove to be a challenge as to whether I still have it within me to complete a novel, written in traditional Chinese script.