Old post

I'm going to fail physics. Something is wrong with me.

This is an old thing that I wrote from something more personal than this venue but I guess it's breaking down barriers time.

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One of my favorite books of all time is Bloomability. In fact, I really like Sharon Creech as an author, overall. Sometimes it surprises me, or at least it occurs to me, how wise children’s books are. Like Guthrie’s story of the two prisoners, one who saw only dirt and the other who saw only sky. I remember there is something similar to that in Everything On A Waffle, and I know that Walk Two Moons also has these little pithy truths embedded inside the story. I really like how children’s books (or young adult’s books, more precisely) offer these wisdoms up front like a sign instead of how in adult literature you have to arrive at the message through all the twisting and turnings of the plot. Maybe I’m not advanced enough as a comprehender of literature, because I forget easily the messages in books like Jane Eyre or Heart of Darkness although I liked them. Or it seems to me like it’s a showy, extravagant way to give readers some universal truth.

Every paragraph of Bloomability on the other hand, seems to me clean and serves two functions, both to perpetuate the plot and to convey the author’s truth behind the story. Like:

So not everyone was kind and not everyone was friendly, but most people were, and even more startling than that was that so many people wanted to show you how to do things—not things like how to burn down a barn or smoke a joint or steal a bike—but things like how to swim or develop film or climb a mountain. My mouth was hanging half open most of the time.

It makes me happy. It makes me happy that most people were friendly to Dinnie at her school, because then that is maybe, probably true of the rest of the world. Even in this real world. It doesn’t reek of heedless optimism—Dinnie is too struggle-ful for heedless optimism—so there isn’t a danger of it causing that effect in the reader, but instead gives the feeling a sort of benevolent connection in the world; not actively, aggressively being nice but most people were friendly.

I admire Guthrie and Lila’s characters for precisely the same reason Dinnie admires them, although why she so wants to be Lila’s friend confuses me a little. Maybe it’s because she likes feeling wanted by someone so forcefully and certainly themselves, and not afraid to be annoying with it. In any event,

Guthrie was different and he was interesting, and so was Lila. What I liked about them was that Guthrie was complete Guthrie through and through, and Lila was Lila through and through...

I always felt like if you were remotely rude or yourself too much, people wouldn’t want to be friends with you but I guess I never actually looked closely at the evidence life presented me. Because it isn’t as if I dislike my friends due to their flaws, but rather that I like them in spite of it. Like in my mind it would be bad form for me to stop being friends with someone just because of what they say or do, and that probably holds true for the thinking of others as well. Therefore, shouldn’t I not be afraid of sometimes offending people? Of people sometimes not liking me, or finding me rude, or insensitive?

Well, that’s not exactly what I mean either. I don’t think I’d go out of my way to be insensitive, or rude, or offensive because it is not in my personality to be that way. But I believe it does mean that I don’t have to be so goddamn polite all the time.

I guess, like Dinnie, I want to be the same as everyone else but at the same time I want to be different. Deep down, I want to be a Guthrie, a Lila, because then you are intensely unique. I don’t want to be one of the agreeable, smiling masses. It seems to me braver to be someone like that, but I don’t know at what point you are supposed to be yourself and at what point you should try and become the person you want to be. How do you know what you want isn’t catastrophic for yourself? Or just simply wrong for you?

Is there even a right for you?

I wonder if other people think these thoughts. I sometimes wish I could just be like, fuck it, I am going to live and not think and be perfectly happy existing in the physical and not metaphysical world. But I can’t do that. Because I already have thought, and do think, so that would be pretending. But isn’t sometimes pretending the first step to changing into what you want to be?

See how annoying and circular my thoughts get sometimes.

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i spy

Becca and I rearranged the living room yesterday. It was an exercise in stick-with-it, because the imminent danger was that we would discover nothing could actually fit any other way and instead we would have rearranged (for two hours) our way back to the original configuration. In the end, however, it happened. It looks fantastic. Furthermore, the possibility of a three way collision between person A walking in, person B sitting at table, and refrigerator door being opened, is now gone. The idea is so decadent I can't even deal. Luxury!

Now that the table is in a different place the view out the window is different. I was sitting there, brewing some tea, and happened to look up. Usually I look out the window either straight and get a view of some some highly suspect back door of a place whose front I can't find, or towards the left, up and over some rooftops towards the capitol. But today I glanced up and saw something completely new. Which is crazy, because we have lived here for seven months now.

I think about this phenomenon often, actually. It happened one time while I was bus-ing to work at the hospital, and I sat at the very back in one of those seats that faces each other and run parallel to the bus sides (those are always kind of awkward when filled with people all trying to look past each others' faces to the windows behind). Anyway, we drove past the place where the marching band practices, and I suddenly saw a perspective of Madison that I couldn't ever remember seeing before: looking back over the practice field, over the Nat, and seeing the capitol in the background.

It doesn't sound that mind-boggling now, but at the moment that these things happen it's like a physical snap. Because it is incredible that we can go about our lives everyday, passing the same views, seeing the same sights, but changing it just the slightest bit can bring about an entirely new experience of something familiar. That makes me wonder, how much of the world do we miss because we don't make that small change--we don't sit on a different side of the bus, look out a different side of the window, or look up as we pass by a building and see the angles of the roof, the light's pattern on an overhang, something completely new.

It's as if a blind opens in a room you thought you knew so well. Every moment such a thing happens reminds me that human perception is a product of our non-foolproof minds. Especially since I don't believe in an objective reality, I think these moments are critically important: to remind us our reality is constructed, and therefore we can see, or miss, many things, and that we have the ability to look a little differently or harder. Maybe even more than the ability, maybe we have the responsibility to do so--to rearrange our sight every now and then.

Fucking car alarms

I kind of want to start a blog. I've been thinking about it for a while, actually, which then led me to a huge internal debate about the rationale behind blogging, the merits of it, how stupid it might be (conclusion--stupid). Also, what the meaning was of having your private thoughts posted on a semi-public forum, therefore clearly intending them to be public but at the same time having it as a sort of venting brainsteam method and thus, the deep meaning behind blogging: reaching out to others through the privacy of our thoughts. Are we blogging for ourselves? Are we blogging to reach the world?

Well. Clearly since I posted on this new thing (this shit was confusing to create, there were all these strangely named possible layouts and my vague memories of livejournal editing got mixed up with this and also with Neopets, both of which were my incentive for learning html--and then I forgot it all. backslash memory) I did get a blog. I caved. My blog white flag is waving. White blog flag. Blag. I wonder how many blogs start out with self-aware blog posts, all rambling about "I was thinking about getting a blog..."

Something interesting I just found in a notebook margin and which I want to think about more later: "Stereotypes are not not true, they are simply incomplete." 

Going back to blogging, and writing though. When I was younger, I came up with a dramatic statement in my head about why people addressed their diaries and journals as if they were human, in the form of Dear Diary, etc etc. Actually, this wasn't that commonplace apparently but for some reason I was under the impression that it was. Anyway, I decided that we addressed our journals because it was the most perfect connection we could ever make to any other being, since it was essentially to ourselves and thus to someone entirely trustworthy and understanding, but we were deluding it into an act of confiding in someone else. It was our attempt to make our most deeply personal sharings an act of human connection. Of course, since the premise was false, the only place that statement could lead to was depression. 

This made me begin to write some sort of story about a person with a computer connected to their brain except the computer was once a human being. In a fit of cleverness I named the within-computer-human Mind. The main character had Mind in her mind and was basically schizophrenic, except Mind could turn on lights and adjust thermostats. Essentially I wrote a story about a schizophrenic universal remote. 

Sometimes I think about how our thoughts are cyclical. We can think about ourselves thinking about our thoughts about thinking. The problem with thinking like this is that I get overwhelmed and kind of mentally dizzy, like I've looked through too many mirrors all reflecting each other. 

Also it may be a product of it being 3 the fuck AM. Shit. Things are running through my mind like they usually do at this hour, and everything is interesting and more crazy than normal.