i tried to look away, but i kept looking back at you

i wish i could put up a picture for the title instead of just words.

back home in glendora again. this must be the most i've been home over a fixed period of time within the last 4 years. i think i will use this weekend to draw more stuff. i have to keep drawing so that laziness doesn't take over the only part of me that's still working properly. the day i get too lazy to draw will be the day of my demise. and if that day should come before i die, kill me.

i finished reading monster. it was good. very good, infact, so let me tell you how i managed to get myself into reading monster.

i was at the bookstore, trying to waste the twenty-eight minutes i still have left before i have to go to WLH 2120 to watch demonstration of the projects that my physics friends made over the course of 10 weeks. i saw a dude reading FLCL, so i thought i'd pick it up and see what's so good about it. after the first few pages i lost interest. the artwork just didn't interest me.

then i saw monster.

the horrible thing about campus bookstore selling manga is the fact that most of the manga in there does not have the first volume in stock. that is very retarded. which idiot would pick up volume fourteen of a manga and suddenly get interested in reading the whole entire thing?

(upon making such a thought, i realized i've managed to offend a lot of people without even intending to do so)

monster was the only one manga in the bookstore with volume one in stock. this is probably because the damn thing had just been released a month ago, but i didn't know that, so that was not my problem. i picked it up and started reading. i finished the book during the demonstration i was talking about earlier. i believe i was despised by my peers for not listening to what was presented and was reading book instead, and it didn't help that i was standing in front every time there's a project being presented.

i wanted to read volume two. i told ocean about this and he said he still had 1-9, scanlated, in his harddrive, so he uploaded them for me. the next thing i know i pulled another all-nighter reading that manga. the sun was out when i finished volume nine. that was when i made a post two days ago.

mira told me she has the rest, so i asked her to send them to me via msn. that took forever, but i managed to get up to volume 14 this morning. after reading fourteen volumes, i just couldn't stop. it's like cocaine. i needed my fix or i will die in pain. i IM'd vilda and chang. vilda said she has it at home, and chang said he had to dig up his CD. i MADE chang dig up the damn CD, and i made him send me the chapters. but i had to go back to LA and i knew i would not be able to concentrate on driving if i didn't at least get volume fifteen. at the same time the transfer via msn was going at about 10k/sec. i was desperate, but then chang and vilda both directed me to an irc channel that apparently hosted 15-18. so i went there and got few MBs per second.

now i am happy because i finished the series, but now i want another monster. human beings are never satisfied, aren't they?

i find myself reading monster as an ironically funny thing. over the course of a year, i've had people telling me to read monster, but i've always responded with "ok" and never actually went and read the thing. this i've done many times to many people. for some reason, it has been very hard for me to believe in other people's recommendation. whenever people say "you're gonna love this," the first thing that came to my mind was "how would you know? you can't read my mind, you don't know how i think, and you don't know what i like." and not just that, usually reading a manga that is recommended by someone else makes me dislike the manga a little bit. maybe i have a taste that i don't believe anyone else has. whether this taste is a good one or a bad one, no one can judge. after all someone else's bad taste is just bad because it's different from your taste. a taste is completely relative and subjective.

maybe i should start trusting people.

or maybe not. i find it hard to believe anyone because people around me had always been telling me lies. the people that i did trust in the past turned out to always disappoint me. the people who seemed sincere, only acted so because they wanted something from me. the skeptical view of life is true: the only person you can trust is yourself.

especially when the satisfaction from finding a good manga by yourself, without the help of other people, makes the manga twice as good. it's like being able to solve a physics problem all by yourself after spending three nights working on it. asking someone for help might reduce the time you spent by a significant amount, but the satisfaction you get is only the satisfaction from getting it done, and never the satisfaction of being able to solve it.

and come to think of it, i think i'd rather live with people telling me "see? i TOLD you!"

i'm weird like that.