Some thoughts

On the way home today I started thinking about how I sometimes feel that people forget their friends when they start working. They work hard all day, come home, and are too tired to email or chat with their friends just to see how their, likely equally tiring, day was. Sure, I can understand when this happens occasionally, but everyday for months on end? Do people really forget about their friends? Is it seen as somehow fulfilling your responsibility as an employee to put in all o those extra hours and ignore the people whom you call -- used to call(?) -- friends? Yes, I can understand that you do have to fulfill your obligations to work, but we have to recognize that there is, in a sense, an obligation to other people -- indeed an obligation to yourself -- to maintain the basics of a human relationship. I feel that people these days are forgetting that. As Murakami Haruki said in his acceptance speech of the Jerusalem Prize: we are all fragile eggs easily shattered against the wall known as The System (which I actually felt was a very dystopian word to use). Perhaps this is an example of that System affecting what we feel we are responsible for. In my opinion, in the long run our human relationships are much more important than our jobs, but we're caught in this System -- the real world as some call it -- and feel the need to elevate these Systematic obligations above all else. Perhaps something to think about a bit.*

I watched 時をかける少女 (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) again today. It's such a powerful movie. I didn't cry, but I was on the brink just as the movie ended... The soundtrack is beautiful and the theme song is the climax of that beauty. It is sad, yet hopeful; it evokes feelings of losing something, but looking towards the future hoping to find it again. I guess I'm tending to like those types of songs these days. You should watch it...

*I'm not promoting anarchism/antiestablismentarianism with my discussion of the so-called System, I'm just applying Murakami's metaphor to my observations of human behaviour.