Track meet yesterday reignited my flu; thrown on with cough, sore throat and sunburn streaking my nose, peeling skin and an unexplainable fatigue that always comes with leaky noses, I stayed home today. I don't really regret going for the Track Meet though; it was fun, fun, fun, and laughing and singing and screaming and ripping your throat and trying to spot hot guys (ahem... Quite an epic failure, and such an idea only occurs when we're too bored) and drenched in perspiration and sticky arms and legs is something hard to forget.

There's supposed to be Third Lang later on, but I feel kinda woozy and weak still, even after staying in bed sleeping for the bulk of the morning accompanied with books and bottles of water and flu pills (Clarinase, they're called). So probably I won't drag myself out of the house lest I die further, but I still feel kinda guilty, abandoning poor Drii...

I always seem to fall sick on Fridays. I remember last year, most of my sick days were Fridays. And I always skipped Third Lang unless there was a test later on. Which I didn't fare very well for, but that's okay. At least guilt didn't really have me then.

I realised that books are great pals to have when you're sick (Because you don't really have the mood to finish up overdue homework with a spinning head, a blocked nose and clogged, phlegmy throat, sometimes). I finished David Levithan's "Are We There Yet" this morning, and he writes so easily and smoothly and simply, yet there's so much emotion and feelings lacing his words.

Writers speak so freely through their words, and I envy that.

Learnt something else from David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green", which is extremely intriguing and a really good book. It says that beautiful words ruin poems, because too much of it would make the 'palate nauseous'.

Beautiful poetry speaks the truth, not piles of cheem words that look pretty but don't truly mean a thing.

Beauty and truth intertwine; beauty cannot be, without truth - because truth is beauty.

Now I understand why beauty cannot defined only with its surface; it must be true, genuine, without falseness and lies.

Now I understand why I think that way, so differently from everyone else, because my perception of beauty is greatly affected by what's inside; because I realised I need to see truth to define beauty.

The boy in this book has to write under a pseudonym in order for his poems to be published and read as bullies in his school regard writing poetry as 'gay' (-_-); his own name for his poetry is a lie, but in the world, we have to live that way, using other methods to speak the truth you want the world to hear, pretending all the time just so that you can save yourself.

Not only in terms of poetry, but it applies to everything else in life too. Words. Speech. Things that can never be said or done without hurting yourself, or someone else.


"True poetry is truth. Truth is not popular, so poetry also is not.
If an art is true, if an art is free of falsenesses, it is, a priori, beautiful."
-Black Swan Green, David Mitchell.