Dr. Koto

Finish watching the Japanese drama Dr. Koto's clinic. An elite doctor initially working in Tokyo comes as a (self-)exile to an off-land island to be a local physician, attempting a personal redemption making up to the wrong he has done that held responsible for an accidental death of one of his patients. In the island, he devotes himself whole-heartedly to taking care of both the body and the heart of the islanders.

Though a bit too much sentimental, the drama in general is quite heart-moving in many episodes where the meaning of life and the intimacy as well as mutual contact between human hearts is illustrated. After watching this drama, one cannot help feeling that one particular thing becomes more than clear. No matter how brilliant one's career or vocational skills are, and no matter how advanced a working environ one may find himself in, what deems the most important is none other than finding a place, a locus, however local, provincial, or even under-developed it may be, where one can have this abundant sense of belongingness, the sense that one is needed, that one's life is not trivial and expendable.

Everyone needs this place to feel his or her own life, his or her living practices, worthwhile. As one female character in the drama tells Dr. Koto, "you are the happiest (or the most felicitous) doctor in the world." Indeed. Yet have I found such a locus?

In Memoriam

Start to play the game in memoriam. Fabulous and fantastic. In a mystery-thriller scenario to solve the puzzle to track down a serial killer who is responsible for missing persons.

The feeling, however, upon playing the game, is about the intriguing and captivating character of knowledge. As the puzzle involves several branches of esotericism, the search for relevant knowledge and information on the net comes across several pages written in languages other than English. This experience only reinforces my eagerness to recapture my French study which has stopped for quite a long time.

Human knowledge is always appealing to my love. Yet one gets only to know that knowledge cannot be reached without certain skills in languages. Reading those arcane letters either of Greek, Latin, or of non-English languages, I cannot help feeling helpless in not being able to get down to the facts recorded there.

Got to give myself some time to learn a language other than English. Though I'm getting older and busier with mundane and career chores, I just can't ignore my love for knowing more of human pursuit after something in the yonder. Got to put myself together and work something out, thus making myself feel that my life is not entirely meaningless.

Regain

Almost a year from the time I created the blog, now I finally have time to get its template done and am ready to start writing my blog. Maybe this postponement is not entirely meaningless. I was at NDHU when creating my first blog account along with a course blog. My time then was all spent maintaining the course blog at the cost of my personal blog. Yet now I am transferred to NCTU and start a new teaching job and academic life at a new place. Here I start thinking of going back to my personal blog as my life here is for the most time in solitude which, interestingly, does not look repulsive to me. I almost welcome this new solitude of mine as my age is approaching to the mid-point of a general life span. It is at this time and in this solitude that I feel the urge to keep a record of my thinking and feeling that catch me by surprise from time to time. I would like to imagine that one or two decades after I can have a chance to look back at my life in this period. I am writing here, maybe, for a future unknown to me. And by this writing gesture I might want to render that unknowable-ness foreseeable at least a bit.