Wednesday 19 February 2003

Pic of the day: Picture from anime Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto. Because there can never be too much catgirl in your life!

Collecting vs. enjoying

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
that David played, and it pleased the Lord,
but you don't really care for music, do ya?

(Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah, from the CD Various Positions.)

There is a wandering story about a man who sat playing one and the same chord on his guitar all the time. His friends asked him why he only played one chord, and he replied: "All the others search for the right chord, but I have found it."

In religious context, this story is used to illustrate the stupidity of clinging to one single ritual or point of doctrine, rather than facing the wide open real life with its countless choices and unanswered questions. This seems to be particularly popular in religion, to specialize in some narrow point and dig in there like a burrowing mole. It also happens in political activism. More about that another time perhaps?

***

But for most people it's the other way around. Running from point to point, there is just so much to cover. We must go to Thailand this summer, because we have never been there yet! But we haven't been to New Zealand either! How will we find time, and money, for both of them? And we haven't bought a flat-screen plasma TV but what about the new car? We have to have it all! We must cover all the bases ...

In any large office, unless it is extremely well organized, the workers will receive a flurry of information that they don't find immediately useful. Perhaps it was really meant for someone else but was sent to the whole office just to make sure; or perhaps it is not useful right away but could come in handy some later day. Whatever the reason, it does not strike them as important to read right away. So they archive it. If it's an e-mail, they print it out and then archive it. If it's a circulating list, they photocopy it, then archive it. Now with a good conscience they forget the whole thing. After all, they have it in the archive.

***

Somewhere in between these am I. To be honest, this entry started in my brain this morning as I was about to go to work. First I started to download a new episode of anime, since the one I had downloaded in the night was finished and I was about to leave the house for around 9 hours. It would be a shame to let the broadband just sit idle when there was so much anime out there. The thing that made me think was the fact that I started to download episode 4, without having seen episode 1 yet. Now this is probably not a big deal, since it was recommended by my online friend LightHawk, who also recommended Hikaru no Go. And you know how much I loved that series. Besides, LightHawk is a very good and pure young man, so his choices of anime are likely to be pretty safe.

Even so. I still haven't watched even one of the six episode anime that I downloaded a couple days ago. My anime fad seems to be fading already, as I return to Dark Age of Camelot to play my reaver. There are only so many hours in the day, and every hour of watching anime is one less hour for other things I enjoy. So, like the people in the office, I download the anime but instead of watching it I just archive it. That's rather stupid, now that I think about it.

(Though yesterday I did watch an anime I downloaded last week, Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto, about a catgirl with magic powers that she usually is unable to control. It is a very childish cartoon, but you can never have too much catgirl in your life.)

Archiving is something that tends to happen as I approach the end of a fad. For instance, I still have a few CDs I bought but did not listen to more than one song. And I have computer games that I bought but hardly ever played. I have online comics bookmarked that I don't read, and the same for online journals. Fads have their own momentum, so even when my heart is no longer present, my brain and my body continue for a little while.

I guess it is time to repent a little, to slow down and enjoy the life I have while I have it. It won't last forever, you know ... or will it? Certainly not if I'm not even thankful now.