First, Amanda, my PC, has gotten an upgrade last week so she's working faster than she's ever had before. I can surf, chat, run a Word document, do application somersaults, and play Marvel Ultimate Alliance all at the same time without worrying if she's going to die on me any second. I also gave her more hard drive space, so yay! I get to keep my porn -- I mean, movies!
Second, I jumped into the Music Edition bandwagon and purchased a Nokia N73 ME phone yesterday. I stuffed it with songs as soon as I got home, and the sound quality doesn't disappoint at all. Plus, with 2 Gigs of memory, I can cram as much albums as I want in it. Life just isn't the same without a soundtrack.
And last but most definitely not least, I was able to watch Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters Per Second the other day. Subtitled 'A Chain of Stories About Their Distance,' the film is divided in three parts, focusing on Tohno Takaki's life from the time he was 13, then 16, then 25. The title refers to the speed at which cherry blossoms fall, alluding to the way human relationships struggle against time, distance, and love. The film is quite short, totaling to just about an hour of playback, but everything about it -- the art, the words, the music -- will leave you breathless. An article I read online describes it as "akin to a Haruki Murakami novel brought to life," and I must admit, the feelings of love, loss, and distance which the film evoked had a similar resonance when reading a Murakami novel. Everything is poetry.
"And in that moment, the dwelling place of eternity, hearts, and souls became clear to me. It was as if I understood everything that had happened in my life these past thirteen years, and the time which was to come. I became unbearably... sad. Akari's warmth, her spirit -- how should I treat them, where can I bring them? That was something I didn't know. That we would not be together forever after this was a fact I clearly grasped. The vast lives we had ahead of us, the boundless amount of time which laid unavoidably stretched out in front of us. But... the anxieties which I had caught sight of soon melted away. And after that, only Akari's tender lips remained."
