Hear/Say

What are these for, besides keeping Beauty + Beasts' magical rose alive??

I spent all morning reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar– no, I haven’t read it before, and before you let those dead jaws drop (I mean you, elitist name-dropping hipster majoring in *hand to forehead* English– good grief, I don’t give a rat’s scabies-ridden hindquarters how many books you’ve purchased or read), let me just say that I am a neurotic reader.

Into books... not this way

As in: I believe I have a problem with reading. This is a self-initiated intervention on the behalf of me: Grace, you are way too into books.

Let me clarify: this is not a brag on how nerdy I am. I think I have this escapist mind-set when I get into a book, and I invest much emotion and thought into a plot that’s merely been exposed to me through the letters burnt black on a page. So the protagonists’ realities and constraints pervade my own, and the plot’s roots entwine their small tendrils and crucial moments into my private sphere of life.

Which explains why I was so obsessed with the sci-fi-/fantasy genre. I couldn’t go out like a normal adolescent and go through certain rites of passage (strict, over-bearing parents of high school years) so I buried myself in my own imagination. Maybe that’s why I’m also so indecisive and particular. I imagine the possibilities to death, instead of freely living through the possibilities. I used to have this insane habit of narrating, in my head, what I was doing at every moment. It drove me crazy. Constant meta-analysis is a destructive amount of self-awareness, to the point where everything you do seems so unnatural to yourself… you question motives instead of inherently following intuition.

Sylvia Plath makes Crazy Look Good

That said, reading Plath’s The Bell Jar makes me feel insane. Is this the product of her quality of writing? Perhaps. Yet while i was reading it, I found it ironically comical that Esther would try and fail suicide so many times, her madness seeking and rejecting help almost simultaneously. Too much drama backlashes into incredulity.

This contradiction lives within … a lot of us. The issue of masculinity, for example– the camaraderie of males holding beers while juggling the homophobic distance of a ten-foot pole (no, not pole; god forbid any phallic symbols). Or, the seeming split between being “cool” and “being yourself” (do people strive to be truly original or are the characteristics of their personality built upon their nurturing environment?), eventually being merged as you age with senility and experience. Am I stretching these parallels?

What am I getting at? Books make me think too much. Even the narrative style, the language flow, seeps into my brain until I’m soaked as an oversaturated sponge. I need to stop freaking out and pay attention to COM 371′s Problem Managing Sequence. Four steps for excellent small-group-decision making awaits me.

GUH’Bye

Graceee