Friday Ramblings

Friday Ramblings

It is one in the morning. My roommate is snoring like crazy. I slept a little extra earlier tonight, so now feels like a good time to write some nonsense and sort through the mess in my head.

I used to write things like this on paper. Jumping into a blog like this suddenly makes me think about wording and layout much more carefully, so it feels a bit restrained. Still, here I am.

I finished setting up this blog recently, and the result ended up being pretty far from what I had imagined. The main discovery was that I am too lazy to update it often. Writing even a short post is a hassle. But at moments like this, when I am writing late at night and doing something that may not matter much in any practical sense, I do feel strangely happy.

Reality is always far away from imagination. Enthusiasm fades hard. Maybe it is not even enthusiasm, but drive. At this point I have developed a strange kind of obsession with knowledge itself. Sometimes I am not learning for any concrete purpose at all. It feels more like a fixation: whether it is useful or not, do it first and think later. But that still does not mean I actually want to do it. Being capable of doing something and wanting to do it are completely different things.

These days my threshold for enjoyment keeps getting higher. Games are only really fun if I can share them with someone. Talking to people helps too. That quiet, self-contained kind of immersion I used to have feels like it belongs to the past. Scrolling through videos, posts, and random content can still bring a little pleasure, but only as a way to kill time. Once it ends, all that is left is emptiness.

As for the fun I get from real-life friends, I can only say it is better than nothing. To be honest, I envy them sometimes. One can disappear into games with friends. Another has a life that feels so full. A third person seems to live by a totally different rule set, where getting yelled at once is enough and then they just keep going. Do I really envy them, though? Not entirely. I probably understand my own thoughts the least.

Even when they are all around me, I still feel a trace of loneliness. People are contradictory creatures like that. We want to get close, but we also want distance. We say all kinds of casual things while feeling nothing on the inside. Maybe I am just avoiding something. Because of all this, the only thing that gives me a stable sense of comfort is constantly picking up something new and poking at it. I feel more and more lost. What even counts as friendship? What does fun actually mean? Right now the only thing I can say for sure is that a good night’s sleep really does make life better.

I just finished reading the latest chapter of Jujutsu Kaisen. Why at this hour? Because it updates on Friday nights. Nanami is gone. Nanami, my poor Nanami. The scene describing his final moments was genuinely excellent. It made him feel so complete as a working adult. Maybe it is a kind of reflection too: work is exhausting, there should be a time when it ends, and when it ends you can finally go to that place you used to dream about while working and experience the ease and happiness you never had room for before. I feel sorry for his death, but not exactly that it was wasted.

A lot of highly praised stories these days are built around tragedy: Fire Punch, Chainsaw Man, Demon Slayer. Tragedy really does have a special pull. The key point is that it works. It produces resonance. Most people carry at least some regret in real life, so joy alone does not generate the same amount of discussion. In a way, joy is often just one part of tragedy anyway. Put joy inside tragedy and it is still tragedy. Put tragedy inside joy and it still becomes tragedy. If a tragic story gets a happy ending, people write alternate endings for it. But when a story starts as pure happiness, people are far less likely to create tragic “what if” versions. That expands the room for discussion even more. Even if there were the same number of comedies and tragedies, tragedy would still stand out more strongly. If you insist on turning tragedy into comedy, then you are Fujimoto Tatsuki. So yes, go read Chainsaw Man.

An hour has passed.

Apparently I can still get sleepy after all.