Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Paragraph Eight
I think I should cut my hair, dye it black and then buy a bus ticket to middle-of-no-where-America and get a job as a farm hand or a factory worker. I should rent a room in someone’s basement and start reading obscure novels about pioneers. Maybe I could learn to compost and eat nothing but organic and whole wheat, drink only water and locally brewed beer, maybe some California wine as well. I would have no stove, just a hotplate and I would stop watching television of course, I would wear long skirts made of hemp and cotton and burn all of my bras. I would write a paper on how bras are a constriction of my freedom and man’s modern way to suppress women. I could start buying only American made products and learn to shoot a gun, drive a pick up, no a scooter that runs on vegetable oil and scorn everyone I find for their carbon foot print. I would meet a woman and be confused about my feelings for her and then move on once she got to know me too well. Find some other basement apartment or one in an attack and change my name to something like Lauraleen. I would write home of course, but never call.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Paragraph Seven
I finished reading Paper Towns by John Green last night. The book is brilliant. I had my doubts but this particular "vlog brother" reminded me of what it is to live, to love and to be a friend all in two short days through a teen fiction novel. I find it kind of funny that while a teen myself I read and re-read classic literature and my favorite author was Boccaccio but here I am in the latter half of my twenties reading one "young adult" novel after another.
Paper Towns exposes the sticky sweet melodrama of the teenage years in suburbia just as well as Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower did in 1999, though Quentin tells his story through the search of a childhood crush who has gone missing rather than by writing letters to an anonymous reader as Charlie did. Quentin’s last month of his senior year is the kind of month that interrupts your life and changes everything, he misses his graduation (at which he and his two friends had decided to go naked under their gowns) to hunt down a girl who had gone missing a month earlier and had until graduation day largely been assumed dead. The story however is not so much in the search for Margo but in the discovery of Quentin, Radar, Ben and Lacey who Margo had abruptly left behind in their McMansion filled Orlando suburb.
Green capably expresses the anxiety and the excitement of love and growing up with the aid of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and manages to make (at least in my case) the reader long for the discovery of new life and the thrill of coming adulthood. The book was difficult to put down and the emotions stirred were impossible to ignore. Paper Towns has all the wit of Sarah Vowel with out the history and the friendships are the kind of friendships a person can’t just make up. Reading this book made me want to go on a road trip, rediscover myself and reconnect with old friends rarely spoken to but hardly forgotten. I laughed out loud, cried a little and gasped with shock multiple times while reading about Quentin’s obsession with finding Margo and his antics with the kind of friends that become a sort of family. I am glad to say that I did not read this book in public, my reaction to the pages in Paper Towns most likely would have been quite embarrassing. There is no question what so ever about if I will read Greens two previous novels An Abundance of Kathrin’s and Looking for Alaska, both are already on reserve at the library.
http://www.sparksflyup.com/
Paper Towns exposes the sticky sweet melodrama of the teenage years in suburbia just as well as Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower did in 1999, though Quentin tells his story through the search of a childhood crush who has gone missing rather than by writing letters to an anonymous reader as Charlie did. Quentin’s last month of his senior year is the kind of month that interrupts your life and changes everything, he misses his graduation (at which he and his two friends had decided to go naked under their gowns) to hunt down a girl who had gone missing a month earlier and had until graduation day largely been assumed dead. The story however is not so much in the search for Margo but in the discovery of Quentin, Radar, Ben and Lacey who Margo had abruptly left behind in their McMansion filled Orlando suburb.
Green capably expresses the anxiety and the excitement of love and growing up with the aid of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and manages to make (at least in my case) the reader long for the discovery of new life and the thrill of coming adulthood. The book was difficult to put down and the emotions stirred were impossible to ignore. Paper Towns has all the wit of Sarah Vowel with out the history and the friendships are the kind of friendships a person can’t just make up. Reading this book made me want to go on a road trip, rediscover myself and reconnect with old friends rarely spoken to but hardly forgotten. I laughed out loud, cried a little and gasped with shock multiple times while reading about Quentin’s obsession with finding Margo and his antics with the kind of friends that become a sort of family. I am glad to say that I did not read this book in public, my reaction to the pages in Paper Towns most likely would have been quite embarrassing. There is no question what so ever about if I will read Greens two previous novels An Abundance of Kathrin’s and Looking for Alaska, both are already on reserve at the library.
http://www.sparksflyup.com/
Friday, October 2, 2009
Paragraph Six
I haven't been sleeping, you can see it under my eyes.
My muscles ache and my head feels heavy - I haven't been sleeping.
My employement feels like a high stakes competition. I am a temp and entirely replaceable.
I feel anxious all the time. My stomache wads its self up into little balls of digestive fluids and threatens to push my breakfast back onto my desk every morning.
I paid rent today, I have one dollar left in my bank account until I am paid again.
I haven't been sleeping and you can see it underneath my eyes.
My muscles ache and my head feels heavy - I haven't been sleeping.
My employement feels like a high stakes competition. I am a temp and entirely replaceable.
I feel anxious all the time. My stomache wads its self up into little balls of digestive fluids and threatens to push my breakfast back onto my desk every morning.
I paid rent today, I have one dollar left in my bank account until I am paid again.
I haven't been sleeping and you can see it underneath my eyes.
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