Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Give me a day off and look what happens...my blog gets a fresh summer make-over and I post two days in a row!

I guess I'm posting again because all this time off gives me plenty of time to brood. First, I started thinking about my personal statement or essay thing for my residency application. There's so much I want to say and so many different paths to take and I feel overwhelmed already, like it will be kind of flat and generic. And I don't want anything I ever right to be flat or generic but I'm afraid to break the mold and be too flippant or personal or story-teller-ish. Too much time off to brood, it seems...

Then I treated myself to a Real Book instead of the free crap that breeds in the dark recesses of iTunes. I bought The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green and I hated myself while I was doing it. Because deep down (okay, not deep at all) I really hate popular books. It makes me so mad that everyone flocks to certain books/series/whatever (that inevitably get made into a movie or are only known about because a movie was made of it) instead of wanting to read enough that they find their own books. I fully admit that I'm a reader. I could lie in bed or sit on the couch or on the patio or wherever quiet and read all day and/or well into the night. And I've done that many times. I consume books like people consume TV/social media. So when everyone crowds around a book/series and fawns over it and dissects it to death (Game of Thrones, Twilight, etc etc) I want nothing to do with that book or that series. Because I love feeling like, when I'm reading a book or have read a book, the story is mine (not like, about me, but my possession). That's why I don't tell people my favorite book (which is part of my favorite series of books), even though it's not some obscure thing; because the story and the characters and the feels are special to me.

Anyway, the funny thing about The Fault in Our Stars was that the main character feels the same way about her favorite book: she guards it and doesn't want to share it with anyone else. And then they included my favorite poem ever (The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams). So of course I felt a connection to this character (who is now embodied by an actress and a real voice and all that jazz) and this book and although I didn't find the book to be this amazing, earth-shattering read, I did like it. Only now I feel as though I need to go read something obscure.

I really shouldn't be allowed to have enough free time for this stuff to percolate...

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