Beautiful inside my Mind

悲しいほどきれいだね。。。

This is my favourite phrase from the Japanese pop group Arashi's theme song 'Beautiful Days' for the drama Ryusei no Kizuna. Check out the entire soundtrack- it's great! My sis translates this phrase as 'so beautiful it's sad', which is accurate, but somehow I think of it as 'so beautiful it hurts'. I guess sadness has a tactile quality. When something is sad, it creates a dull ache deep inside me. Lately me and my sis have got into Arashi and another band, KAT-TUN. We like to do home karaoke sessions of their songs and watch their music videos and performances.

In this post I'm trying to fathom why I lack the same amount of enthusiasm for Chinese language and culture, which is after all my native culture. I guess it's because I admire the creativity of the Japanese when it comes to many fields of interest like fashion. And there's a certain exoticism about a foreign language no matter how familiar you become with it, that's absent in one's mother tongue. I do have a favourite Chinese novel called '蝉'. I don't even know why I like it, but I've read it many times. I also enjoy a few Chinese songs, usually sad ones.

Sometimes we get so excited about learning the new that we forget the merits of the old.