(In case you missed out on the advertising they've been carrying out in the media, here's it once more- the MOSAIC Music Fest '07. I'm awfully keen on the 7.30pm show on 17th March with Rachael Yamagata, because her voice's amazing and this might be my best chance to take advantage of the concession for the $88 priced seat paid at $60, which two years approaching, I've not used it before. Another to-do before I ORD involves getting a membership at S'pore Film Society.)

I recently completed my first read of a piece of novel by Mister John Irving. Honestly, someone I've been putting off reading for a long while, simply because his novels, or rather the ones I own, do not have appealing covers. Hotel New Hampshire. Fortunately for myself, it was an engaging read worthy of a movie production. It does, strangely, brings me back to my first novel with Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City (actually, pretty much so nobody's first book of Kerouac, since most Kerouac lovers started off with On The Road, something I've still not read, Big Sur or Dharma Bums).

I do not feel strangled today, and I only feel so tonight on my way home because I must had been feeling oppressed all along (which dates a while back , I reckon). It is comforting to know there are various ingenious and surprising solutions which pop up every now and then in this complicating era. The geek in me and you would understand this simple comic strip (a new comic site I discovered and bookmarked with glee), which explains why Pearls Before Swine never fail to cheer me up. Two things to do before the sun gets too hot: have the opportunity to communicate to Bill Watterson and Stephan Pastis how much they've kept me away from the sleek, comfortable, air-conditioned psychology-therapy room because of what they convey with their form of expression.

Kerouac wrote a simple line in Big Sur that caught my eye and has flagged at my train of thought a couple of times now, so I thought I should share them:

"Cliches are truism and all truism are true" [found in Chapter 7]

It is a line that appears in parenthesis, so it probably wasn't that important; he was just rambling on, that stream of consciousness style of writing.

Fast forward to what Mister Douglas Coupland writes in Shampoo Planet:

"In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into otheres and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves." [page 171]

The more ambitious among us seeketh to be humble and noble. Can I eat my humble pie and declare to myself that perhaps I am not up to the task of assisting in someone else's life, and that it is one noble act to step back firmly and completely, because letting go allows that particular someone to grow, and to achieve?

In Irving's Hotel New Hampshire, Lily Berry decides to label her attempt to write as 'trying to grow'.

I'm trying to grow too.