The Road, ARX

My company is going back to five days weeks next month, which is a real bummer. I've gotten used to three and four day weeks, and I've seen that this is the way to go. Five days a week is one too many. I would gladly forfeit some salary for that one day back. Now that the Great Slowdown has begun, surely this is the future of work. Why come in five days a week when there is only three days a week of work to do? As you can probably tell, I'm not very ambitious professionally. Probably why I ended up here in Japan.
I'm so glad I've ditched the textbooks. It takes one minute to find an interesting article in this magazine I bought, and translating them is fun. I actually want to get past the words in order to find the information, instead of just trudging through the words to get it done. I'm reading an article about 'Herbivorous Men' which is the latest buzzword here to describe men who aren't really interested in women but more interested in their hobbies, usually banal stuff like figurines and gadgets, and are really passive and weak.
I watched "The Road" last night. I like the moments the man and the boy share, and the end was heartbreaking. I like every movie that Viggo has done, and he is good in this too. He's such an honest actor. It's humbling to think that there are people who are experiencing this situation now, in the shittiest parts of the world. Everyone is out to rob or kill them, the landscape is desolate and barren, and the only hope they have is that their childrens lives might be better than theirs. We lucky people get to sit in a cinema (or in front of a computer) for a couple of hours and think, gee, wouldn't that be terrible. But at the same time, with all these end of the world movies out recently (disaster-porn, they call it), it's obviously something we fantasize about, to have everything gone and to start again. Some critics have put it down to the debt crisis, and the desire to see it all wiped away in an instant. No more mortgage, no more credit card worries, no more stupid job, no more kids whining about getting a Wii or something, just a pure existence, getting food, staying warm. I'd agree with that. There has to be a reason for all these movies. I think it's also a response to the recklessness of Western society that we all recognize but are powerless to stop. The spending, the eating, the waste. "The Road" is probably the first one that shows that the inevitable outcome might actually be pretty shitty, and you might rather want to be dead than alive. Watch "I am Legend" and try not to think, "Wow, being the last human on Earth would be so cool." It's like a 12-year-old boy's fantasy. Maybe that accounts for the feeling I'm getting while watching The Road of "why would you bother?" But then the only thing keeping the man alive is that his son is alive. That would be enough for me, I guess. No, it is enough. If Will was gone, if I had him and then lost him, why would I bother going on? That's why people have children, isn't it. And even if you personally don't have any children, why would you bother if other people didn't either? You wouldn't. Like in the book Children Of Men. No children, no reason to keep everything going. I must admit that when Jo Jo was born I thought, well, he's a backup, isn't he. If something happened to William, I couldn't just throw myself under a bus because he was here. Another reason for living. The question the movie asks is, can this man kill his own son? I think that's what makes it so horrible, because of course he can't. That's what made the end of "The Mist" so weird, too. Not that he killed his own son (and so quickly!), but that we didn't even know that it was on the cards. Sorry if you haven't seen The Mist, but you should have by now. In The Road the man says about his son, "To me he's a God." Isn't that a great line? My son William is my God. He is the only thing I believe in. And Jo Jo's growing on me too.