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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