Tag: books

I just got a new haircut. Half my head is nearly hairless.

It is a look that has always appealed to me. In high school I used to shave half my head clean and various random jerks on the street who didn’t like my unusual hair wanted to start a fight. Now the society has probably evolved enough that I won’t have problems like that.

If you look at me from one side, I look completely different than from the other side.

Like:

A couple of times lately I’ve been asked for an ID when buying stuff at the grocery store. It feels soo good. Like, it makes you feel youthful and fabulous. It is the most amazing compliment for a relatively old guy.

On the other side:

I bought a book and the store clerk put two flyers between it. I thought it was a nice gesture, maybe the flyers are for something good. Later when I got home and looked at the flyers I was flabbergasted, I was dumbfounded by finding out one of the flyers was for a discount on school supplies for kids, and the other one for a kids’ haircut.

I must have looked like a dad to her. I wondered – was it my dad bod, my receding hairline, or some other feature that got me stamped as a father and possibly interested in those kinds of flyers?

Those ridiculous, insulting pieces of paper flew straight to the trash.

I hope the next experience of this kind will be someone asking for my ID again.

Sometimes when you read (or watch) something that makes you feel really strong emotions, you feel weird for days after finishing it.

You feel weird mentally, you feel weird physically.

There’s this strange tightness in your body, like the essence of the thing you read has permeated your whole physical being.

All the things around you remind you of some details from the literary piece.

You can’t read anything else, because nothing else would compare. Reading something else would be akin to sacrilege toward that one masterpiece.

But in a few days, the feeling fades.

And you set out, hungry for more, looking for another story that can make you the same again.

Those kinds of literary works are the best.

(I read some random Korean comic that I liked)

They say there are five senses. Vision, touch, smell, hearing and taste. My nose hasn’t ever really worked well, so I’m lacking the smell one. But even though I am lacking the sense of smell, I’ve noticed a kind of a sixth sense. For each object, location or person – basically anything – I have this specific feeling that fully encapsulates massive amounts of information and memories about the thing into one compact feel.

It is hard to describe it – there aren’t really words for these kinds of things. But I’ve just called that sensation a “feeling” for myself. The “feeling” feels kind of like a color or something. Or a taste. But not quite. And you feel it with your whole being. I haven’t talked about it much nor known if others experience something similar.

Today I started a new book, “Focusing”, written in 1981. It describes the exact same experience I’ve had of sensing everything through an inexplicable “sixth sense”. Since there are no words for these things, the book’s author also made up their own words for them. They gave my “feeling” the name of “felt sense”. For me it’s a wonderful discovery, really validating – knowing that what I’ve been sensing all this time is a real thing and has been written about.

I am pretty bad at explaining things, putting my thoughts to words. But the book explains the “felt sense” pretty well. It feels nice reading a clear description for a thing you always felt but could never fully describe yourself. Now, knowing what to look for, I found even more books about the same topic.

I wish there was way more research about human minds, not just biological, but also psychological, to get some of the current theories to a level where they become scientific truths. Understanding how your mind works would be extremely helpful, especially nowadays with ever increasing rates of mental illness. And the help you can get for those illnesses is currently questionable at best, because we are only still figuring these things out.

I just finished this book. Which is a good read by the way, it changes the way you see things. And I guess Google knew I had just become bookless, because I got recommended this article about Bill Gates’ current top book recommendations. So of course I instabought his #1 recommended book. For some reason the Kindle version was more expensive than the physical version, so I ordered a physical copy. My bookshelf has recently only gotten new mangas – its about time I add an actual new book to it. After I have finished reading it.

Don’t worry, I will let you guys know in a month or so if Bill Gates’ recommendation was a good one or nah.

I’ve read a bunch of books with religious undertones recently. They are nice, though most of them, regardless of continent of origin, write about the same stuff – how being kind and humble is the way to be. I mean, I agree with that. And hate myself for not being kind enough. But there are sooo many other kinds of books out there. Gotta read stuff from different genres to experience as many different things in your lifetime as possible.

Like, recently a friend mentioned that he started listening to the fourth audiobook of Wheel of Time. I read a couple of those books, and, well, they are like that thing. You know. That. Like, I found these results of a survey today, of which girl is the most popular in some mangas according to readers. And on the fifth place there was some girl I hadn’t heard of. I checked out the manga, and well, the girl was being bullied. In school. She was basically being tortured, in the first chapter she was bound to a chair in class for a long time and eventually pissed herself, and then the bully made her clean up the piss from the floor with her tongue. And then, at the end of the chapter, it turned out the bully was actually the one being bullied, the girl actually tortured him outside of school to make him bully her in class. And like, that girl was the fifth most popular girl character. I guess people have different tastes.

Anyway, I think my life has enough pain and misery that I don’t need to add any to it by reading painful books. That’s my opinion of the Wheel of Time series – when you read it, you really start to feel the agony the characters feel because it’s written so well. So I don’t think I’m gonna continue reading that one as my friend did. Instead, I think I’ll spice things up a bit by picking up another self-help book for a change.