imwithjonas's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dense DenseChristopher Rice'sA Density of Souls was quite an experience. I was completely absorbed in this book within three pages. I read the entire thing in my standard drowning in pretty words manner. I sat around glued to the book for hours until I had to come up for air. It was exciting and fast-paced and very intense. For me, it was also intensely thought-provoking. I still haven't discovered the full implications of the latest dramatic change in my life. Something like six months ago, a guy I had only been speaking to for about two days asked me to marry him. He wanted a break on his taxes, and it's not like I had any prior engagements, so I said what the hell. For a week, I was happily and hilariously engaged to a boy I barely knew. We registered at Wal-Mart and everything. We became incredibly close friends incredibly quickly. The marriage thing was kind of awesome because we could even get an apartment together. University Town frowns on boys and girls living together outside the blessed bounds of wedlock. Towards the end of that strangely frenetic week, he told me he was gay and had a boyfriend. Common sense ended the sham engagement, but it didn't matter at that point. By then, we were so close that a sham wedding wasn't going to make us any closer. Sham weddings are pretty pointless when you have a very real friendship. It only took a week. That change has had a wide array of side effects. I realized that I was quite tolerant of "alternative lifestyles." I learned about an entire civil rights movement I'd spent my life ignoring. I realized that people say a lot of dumb things out of fear and ignorance. I guess making the best friend of my life was just gravy on top of all the other things that changed. I'm still changing. A Density of Souls got me thinking. At first, I wondered who in the fuck these kids thought they were. They were vicious and cruel to someone who had been their best friend. This kid needed kindness or support, and they gave him pain on top of the confusion he was trying to sort through. Then I realized I've done exactly what they did. I can remember making fun of the kids we all thought were gay. The two I mocked the most for something they had absolutely no control over were actually gay. There's a reason kids don't come out in high school. I was part of that reason. I threw the word faggot around all the way through high school. I have always been friends with boys. If one of them pissed me off I'd call him a fag and everything would be even. Because gay was associated with bad. If you were gay, not only was your mortal soul in danger, you were an outcast of the worst kind. Even the group of losers that everyone made fun of could pick on the queers. I was one of those losers. I made fun of those poor kids. I'll never know what it was like for them. The process can be explained, I'm sure, but I won't really know. One of the most alarming discoveries I ever made in life is that you can never know what another person truly feels. They can tell you, but something is lost in translation. They don't quite say exactly what they mean, and you don't quite interpret what they said the same way they said it. I just know I hurt a lot of people unnecessarily. I did it because I could. I did it because other people hurt me all the time and I didn't know what else to do. I suppose it was a vicious cycle, but I'm quite sure that's a damn lame excuse. I'd like to apologize to all those people now. I'd like to find the boy I tormented throughout middle school and ask him if he has a boyfriend. I'd like to tell him all about the things I've done with the GSA and how much I've changed since sixth grade when every time he walked by I giggled and whispered to whoever was nearby that he was "so gay." I'd like to apologize to the boy I hurt in high school. When I knew him, he definitely thought he had a crush on me. But he lispingly gave a speech on how to bake a strawberry cake and watched soap operas. I wrote him off as an annoying fag. He dated a girl very much like me - pudgy, sarcastic, and self-deprecatingly humorous. The next year, the rumors pegged him as bi, and after I'd graduated I heard he finally came out. He tried to talk to me one day back before all that. It was a perfectly innocent conversation. He wasn't even being flirty like he usually was with me. I remember quite clearly turning, looking him in the eye, and saying "Jesus, would you quit fucking acting so gay?" I think that one was pretty unforgivable. At the very least it was cruel. I suppose the context was the important thing. The Snow Garden, also by Christopher Rice, is fucking with my head now. This one is a little slow simply based on its own merit. What's getting to me is the creepy "Oh fuck, that's exactly like my life," quality of it. I've always loved the personal connections people can make with books. Having something in common with one of the main characters is at least half the fun of a book. But at the same time, there's a very distinct separation from reality. This book is just eerily similar to my life. The characters aren't exact duplicates, but the relationship is so similar to the most current and most prevalent relationship of my life that it blurs that whole distinct unreality line. I'm not saying I've completely gone off the deep end and am living some book in my head, but it's vaguely alarming. Fortunately, I've been told that things get fantastically unreal towards the end. I think I'll need that. Just to exemplify the problem I'm having here: "After only two months of friendship, she couldn't imagine a night at Atherton without at least several hours of his company, and during those hours they had become experts at completing each other's sentences. They had become the pair that went everywhere together, knew more than anyone together. Meeting Randall had suggested that maybe all men her age didn't use their seemingly God-given self-confidence to erect a façade that hid the frightened and careless little boys they really were. Randall may have had confidence that bordered on stupidity, but at least he sometimes used it to show her the little boy he hadn't outgrown yet." Just plug in the appropriate names and places and you could easily find that written in big bold letters across the past few chapters of my life story. On the other hand, the only certainty in life is that everything changes. Of course, the relationship in the fucking book is changing, too. I'm just saying it's a little creepy. Xavier and I had a great conversation the other day. I decided that if I ever have the money, I'm going to take up smoking to lose weight. He said that had some health risks. I pointed out that I could always get into amphetamines instead. We painted a pretty entertaining picture that involved me dragging around an oxygen tank due to my emphysema. I said that would be just fine. When people saw me walking down the street with my oxygen tank, at least they'd be thinking, "Damn, she's thin!" I thought it was pretty hilarious. Other people might use the word sad. Screw you guys, I'm going home. 10:50 a.m. - June 29, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||