A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

Assumptions suck. They’re like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay?

Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

What’s depressing is when everyone is trying too hard, and the most depressing thing of all is when they’re trying too hard and actually thinking that they’re making it.

Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I’m just wasting my time, and I’m not the only one.

And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.

I mean, if I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I’d post her stories on a blog, but actually I stopped doing that a while ago. It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.

Time itself is being,

and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.

he told us stories about the line of productivity software he was developing, and how computers were going to experience empathy and anticipate our needs and feelings even better than other human beings, and how soon human beings wouldn’t need each other in the same way anymore.

She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be

among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.

DAMN DAMN DAMN!!!!!

Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!

Haruki got bullied a lot in the army because he loved French poetry, so that’s something else that runs in the family: an interest in French culture and getting picked on.

Frittering our lives away.

I understand that you have to take care of your mind, even if it’s not a great one, because if you don’t, you can wind up with your head on the tracks.

When you’re a nobody, you’re always happy when somebody else is getting tortured instead of you, and I wanted to punish him for that.

nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things—including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you—are just kind of flowing through for the time being.

“We live in a bully culture. Politicians, corporations, the banks, the military. All bullies and crooks. They steal, they torture people, they make these insane rules and set the tone.”

DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN

People just going with the program, too scared to speak up.

Metal-binding is what happens when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t move, like some gigantically fat evil spirit is sitting on your

chest.

There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace when you’re floating around out there, all alone, talking to yourself.

Maybe this is what it’s like when you die. Your inbox stays empty. At first, you just think nobody’s answering, so you check your SENT box to make sure your outgoing mail is okay, and then you check your ISP to make sure your account is still active, and eventually you have to conclude that you’re dead.

So, you can see why I was feeling like a ghost.