This weekend, in between contemplating the Inauguration, cleaning out my closet (seriously, 13 pairs of jeans? How did I find space for all of them?), staring blankly at Microsoft Word, making mix cds, buying textbooks (I'm talking 'bout you, Wole Solyinka), tallying up my shoes (54 pairs) and watching old episodes of the West Wing, I flipped through my high school diary. Most of it is crap but this was vaguely amusing:
I started to play a game at lunch with Eric today, we tried to figure out how famous writers would have sex based on their writing styles...
*Hemingway's done before you get started. [I suppose this was based on his terse sentence structure. I don't recall]
*Dostoyevsky would give you VD. [I also don't recall how we determined this, but I suppose it's all that time in the Underground?]
*Tolkien would want to role play.
*Poe would want to tie you up.
*Shakespeare would be the most romantic lover ever...until you realize he was just lying to get you into bed, but boy does he have rhythm.
*Salinger would accuse you of faking.
*Plath would want to call you Daddy.
*Dickens would repeat the same move so many times you'd start to fall asleep.
*Camus would only get it up when the mood strikes him and if he does there's no guarantee he'll finish.
*Kafka doesn't know what he's doing, no one's told him.
This is apparently what I did with my time (you know, for all this reading, I sure as fuck didn't study.) On Friday, I met up with a friend from high school for a few drinks. It was a thoroughly enjoyably trek down memory lane (apart from recalling all of the horrible things I did to him when we briefly dated.) The thing about old friends is how they, without effort, throw your life into stark contrast. Granted, looking over this diary, I was kind of a miserable shit. Petulant, self-absorbed, self-righteous. I was also in high school and I suppose we're all infallible in high school. I guess I had convictions, though somewhat misguided. Communism doesn't especially work in a free-market society... Unless you choose to live on a commune. I've never really been good with yard work. I have turned off somewhat when it comes to political awareness. I've stopped telling people how they shoes are made by tiny Chinese children. Some of my favorite shoes are made by tiny Chinese children. I don't spend much time quote Chomsky and Zapata anymore and I threw out my Che Guevera shirts. But seriously, we made a cultural hero of Proletariat revolution into a commodity. Not exactly in keeping with the tenets of Communism, is it?
I think I've improved it a lot of ways. I didn't try in high school. At all. Once I got to Radford, I made a concerted effort to give a damn and found it relatively effortless. Not that school wasn't a challenge, but it wasn't difficult to want to keep going, even if the going was occasionally difficult. I liked Journalism because I thought it was important to disseminate information. But I didn't necessarily enjoy it. I enjoy literature. I like the look on someone's face when they read Prufrock out loud for the first time. I love the ah ha! moment when meaning in a novel, intended or otherwise, hits the reader. I sit at my computer starting a screen for hours waiting for the moment when I can't stop writing...even if it's shit.
I suppose I have changed. I've become someone I can stand to be around. It's just an added bonus that that person gets to wear cute shoes.
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2 comments:
Could have been much, much worse in high school. You could have been a young Republican.
I'm still working off that sad era.
You should see the pull quote from our senior year high school yearbook wherein Sparky rationalizes that it's good that we're invading Iraq because they need our freedom. Ah, 2004.
WOW it was instant depression writing that year, because math made me realize how it wasn't that long ago. The horror.
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