Harry: You realize of course that we can never be friends.

Sally: Why not?

Harry: What I'm saying is... and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form, is that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

Sally: That's not true, I have a number of men friends and there's is no sex involved.

Harry: No you don't.

Sally: Yes I do.

Harry: No you don't.

Sally: Yes I do.

Harry: You only think you do.

Sally: You're saying I'm having sex with these men without my knowledge?

Harry: No, what I'm saying is they all want to have sex with you.

Sally: They do not.

Harry: Do too.

Sally: They do not.

Harry: Do too.

Sally: How do you know?

Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive, he always wants to have sex with her.

Sally: So you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive.

Harry: Nuh, you pretty much wanna nail'em too.

Sally: What if they don't want to have sex with you?

Harry: Doesn't matter, because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.

Sally: Well I guess we're not going to be friends then.

Harry: Guess not.

Harry: No no no no, I never said that.  (Harry pauses, thinks.)  Yes, that's right, they can't be friends.  Unless both of them are involved with other people then they can.  This is an amendment to the earlier rule,if the two people are in relationships, the pressure of possibility of involvement is lifted.  (Pauses) That doesn't work either because what happens then is the person you're involved with can't understand why you need to be friends with the person you're just friends with.  Like it means something is missing from their relationship and "why do you have to go outside to get it?". Then when you say, "no no no no, it's not true nothing's missing from the relationship", the person you're involved with then accuses you of being secretly attracted to the person you're just friends with, which we probably are, I mean, come on, who the hell are we kidding, let's face it, which brings us back to the earlier rule before the amendment which is men and women can't be friends, so where does that leave us?

Woman, how on earth will you be able to see when enough is enough?

She seems to have had it all—a man she loves who is more than willing to love her back; a man in the past who borders on being deadly charming, which, by the way, totally fits a Scorpio; a man who has been there for her most pathetic and bitchy outbursts but still remains to be the person that is just inseparable from her life. But still, she looks at the three of them with a sigh, not out of content, but out of the deepest regrets.

When we were little girls with ponytails flapping high in the air while we ran on and on like the summer would never end, we had already fashioned a million times our future Prince Charming after a certain fantasy: he might be tall, dark, handsome (needless to say); sweet, smart, and funny; confident but not too full of himself; kind and polite to everyone in the room but his sparkling eyes always, always lightening up just for me.

With the elapse of time and the lash of reality, we somehow make peace with the crude and plain fact: Prince Charming? It ain’t gonna happen! Lucky one sees her fantasy dissolving into different characters, each filling one of her many needs. Others, not so lucky, but all the more stubborn, simply refuse to compromise; they either stop looking and settle for someone who is dull and maybe even bald but just loves her dearly or keep up with this lonely and fruitless search.

Sometimes I feel like we are all in dire need of some kind of special ALL-IN-ONE shampoo: get one bottle home and all your needs are met. Yeah, in a perfect world, we do. But this world, no kidding, is far from being perfect. So that’s why we get one bottle of shampoo with another bottle of conditioner. More importantly, we shuffle the brand-names so that we will be guaranteed to extract different ingredients to make the lustrous, wavy, and cascading hair we want others to see.

Life is all about compromises, eh?

The plot of the book Message in a Bottle is, well, predictable. Half way into it, you can clearly figure out the ending of the story: in this long-distance relationship, where the heroine has “just” worked her way into a “booming” career in a metropolis and her son just “loves” the school there, and the hero, a man who grows up on a beach, finds himself “lost” in the modern jungle, what are you gonna do about their heart-sundering, soul-shaking love? Make him die! Man! It must be easy to be a writer from time to time and all the pieces in life will fall right into place. (PS: does the writer have kind of a male-phobic complex or something? The hero of another book of his, also alarmingly charming, loving and caring—in a word, seemingly perfect—dies a violent death. )

The choice of word is, if not disappointing, mediocre at best. In a supposedly romantic novel, I find the repeated appearances of the word adrenaline quite out of place. And here is the list of words that I have jotted down while reading. Hope it could be of use to people who want to learn something and wish to avoid wasting time going through a whole book.

[svelte, voyeur(which is by the way really odd given the context it was in), autistic, parlay, woozy, frazzle, frolic, primp, broach]

This book is perfect for someone who is just looking for an easy reading. You can finish your book in one sitting, two at the most, with even a bag of crisps in your lap. Although it promises to be very moving, you will not be moved to get a box of tissue. (When the father of the hero calls the heroine in a dismal and grim voice, you know exactly what has happened.)That I can guarantee.

They say poetry is a matter of words and people reveal their desire for and fear of chaos in poems. The rule should be applied to any genre of literature. The desire for chaos is the breath of literature; the fear of chaos is in their parade of forms and technique. So in a very conventional layout of a romantic story, a voice from the bottom of our heart is still crying out for twists and turns of events that will make it almost painful to put the book down. And when that happens, you will know you are reading a great  book.

Like Virginia with her Mrs. Dalloway, she has found her own very first sentence. She thought.

While sharing with her students the story of Nie, her Japanese teacher who was the sole force pushing her forward to chase her dream, she felt tears welling up in her eyes. After so many years, after a blank of any communication between them, that such a tiny episode way back in her life still managed to set her memories in motion reaffirmed what had been on her mind for quite some time: EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON.

With or without our knowledge, our past, every teeny-tiny bit of it, is programmed into our present existence like an indecipherable code which simply can’t be scratched off no matter how much we try. Just like her father’s walking out on her and her mother, like the deep affections between her and Sam, so sweet at first and then inevitably sour and bitter, like the very casual, harmless conversation which was to bring her her husband. Everything happens for a reason, either as a test or a pavement leading to where we are now. We simply can’t fight destiny.

All this was in her head when she rode home after 12 hours’ work. At a crossroads, she stopped and not for the first time in her life, she found her soul floating off her body, looking at the whole world as if nothing could concern her even a bit, as if there were nothing she could relate to—in a word, she didn’t belong here. If she had a choice, she would like to take off and never look back at this world again, leaving those mundane, depressing, heart-sundering incidents to this world and to those who embrace the world like they are embracing sunshine. And, right at that moment, her earphone was singing “Nothing is bigger than love”. Honestly, she doesn’t usually buy crap like this. But maybe, there’s after all a flickering ray of hope deep down in her heart telling her to hold on to the belief, to the real world. And at that point, she felt her feet on the ground again—the threads of hope and warmth, no matter how feeble and fragile, finally managed to hold her back.

Yes, EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON.

(TO BE CONTINUED)