Back Into the Habit

Coming back after a long hiatus is always a bit rough. Writing, even the type of writing on a blog that nobody reads, is a skill that can be unlearned with lack of practice. I have been writing in the strict sense that I’ve been writing papers, but that’s just not the same as making poop jokes and talking about movies on a blog.

One thing that I require to maintain my sanity is consistency. I like having the same schedule every week, for all the weeks, until I die. This doesn’t work, and so last month when I had a two-break from work, a two-week break from school, and a two-week period of writing a research paper, my consistency got fucked up and as a result so did I. I’m only now coming around back to being a real boy again, which sucks, because I’m moving in three weeks, taking a vacation for a week, and starting a new job in the month. None of that shit is consistent with any fucking thing, so it’s going to be hard to maintain the blog until mid-October. Your patience is appreciated.

You may have noticed that I made a few aesthetic and one substantial change to the blog. I switched a few colors around to make the whole thing look even more boring than it was before, added a new picture and changed the title. The new title is now Little Toy Rabbit, and like the last title, this one holds multiple meanings for me.

The obvious one is that I’ve been getting more and more into movies these days. If you take a look back at the older posts (or, actually, on second thought, don’t) you see I write a lot about atheism, politics, music and sometimes even science. The title back then was The Unbidden Pen , when I mainly interested in fiction and fiction writing. The next title, The Peripatetic, represented both my love of travel, the idea that one learns through travel, and a love of science (since we are traveling through space or some shit. I don’t fucking know.)

Now, Little Toy Rabbit. When you tell your friends about it, you can call it LTR. If you like the same movies I do, you may have recognized where this title from using the banner picture. In Ikiru, my favorite movie by my favorite director, the protagonist is dying from stomach cancer, and reaching a particularly rough patch. He goes to his…friend? for help, and she tells him to stop bothering him and get a fucking hobby or something, christ. Her hobby is making little toy animals, and she pulls out a toy rabbit, which hops across the floor. This gives the protagonist the idea to do something with his life, instead of just breezing through it. He then spends the rest of his remaining days working to build a public park in a poorer neighborhood previously ignored by the government. After building the park, which requires a lot of work on his part (especially considering that he has stomach cancer) he is promptly forgotten by his peers and superiors, and life goes on.

Now, not only does the title represent a love of my movies on my part, I think we should all be “Little Toy Rabbit”ing our lives. Work to do something that matters, despite it being hard on you, despite the fact that you will suffer greatly for it, and despite the fact that not everybody will even care what you did. It’s an idea emphasized in Kurosawa’s arguably more famous work, The Seven Samurai. Even if you lose, even if nobody cares, you can still do a good thing.