Saturday, April 21, 2007 | 9:17 PM

I finished watching Nobuta wo produce last night! Apart from the headiness from watching so much of Kame and Yamapi, there is also this quiet resonance with many of the lessons and themes presented in the drama.

I quite enjoy the show's way of presenting all these to us, through Shuji's many inflections, and the disclosures from its other characters as well.

There is one theme which stood out in the drama throughout my viewing yesterday, probably because of its coincidental timing with the Virginia Tech University massacre.

Which is the imapct of people, whether intentional or not, have on each other.

It is so easy to be willful and be mean to people whom you dont like. Like how Bando can just walk up to Nobuta and pull her hair or just say mean things to her. You don't have to be responsible for that mean act. You can easily explain away the negative impact of your actions by saying that this is just one out of the few hundreds of the human interactions the victim would have throughout the day, so why would it matter.

But haven't we learn, throughout our lives, that the quality of the interaction is just as important as the quanity? Little things, such as poking fun of someone's appearance, whether intentional or not, once a day, adds up. Major quarrels, even if it takes place once throughout two person's friendship, is suffice to change things.

Everyone is a piggy bank, differently shaped and sized. For one negative interaction, you put in a coin in them. Some coins are of bigger values, some not that much. But eventually all the coins add up.

In the case of Nobuta, she was shutting herself from the outside world so as to reduce the numbers of coins trickling in. I wouldn't say that she has a huge capacity of tolerance for negative interactions. If not for Shuji and Akira, who in a way saved her, this piggy bank would most probably have cracked and spilled all the coins, just like the student in Virginia Tech did.

And in his case, this doesnt tell us about the capacity of this student's tolerance for people's negative behaviour towards him. But it does show that all of the coins add up to the extent that he couldnt bear it anymore, and he reacted.

All this brings to mind, how does one measure one's impact on another person? I am not sure if one can actually do that actually. And I am very much underqualified to comment on it anyway.

But I think my interpretation of people as piggy banks is flawed.

If we assume that people are indeed piggy banks, doesnt this mean that you can take a coin out of your own piggy bank, and put it into someone else's?

Maybe it is not flawed.




But maybe we humans are.

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