Nothing Can Come of Nothing

It's been a great long while since I've read King Lear.  A couple of years, really, since I've either read or watched anything Shakespearean at all.  But as I was mulling over some things I'm not entirely sure that I'm content with, this phrase popped into my head.

I frequently go through periods where I feel as though I get antsy with everyone and everything.  The antsy-ness may or may not be visible, I really don't know, but I sometimes find myself wishing that I could just run away from everything for a while until I get myself sorted out.

Sometimes it passes through, just a brief visitor reminding me that there's no such thing as feeling absolutely settled with everything.  And sometimes it stays for a while, prompting and re-prompting an assessment of things that I can change, that maybe I should change, that maybe I just need a longer reminder can be changed.  Sometimes it morphs into the winter, spring, summer, and fall of my discontent.

I've been known to ponder running away to escape this feeling, but I know that's patently ridiculous: anything internal would follow me.  It's a silly impulse since I've only discovered two ways of getting rid of this sensation--waiting it out and actually making a change.

And I'm starting to wonder about whether I should make a change, because Lear keeps popping into my brain.  Nothing can come of nothing, and I need to make some choices.  I need to take some actions or I need to choose not take some actions.

But in the meanwhile any time I encounter this feeling, I have a feeling this saying will be swimming around in my brain until I choose.  Doing nothing, choosing nothing, will result in nothing.

You're Know You're Kinda a Book Nerd When...

So I live down the street from Toad Hall.

No, really, there's an older and nicer and gated house at the end of my street that is called Toad Hall.

I have no idea who, if anyone, lives there.

So clearly, I picture Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows living there, because--hello!--it's Toad Hall.  And he just never comes out because he doesn't want to scare his neighbors.

And the Answer is, Clearly, Fairy Tales

So I've noticed lately that a lot of popular YA lit these days is purely dystopic in nature, and I've speculated about it.  But something had been nagging at me, and that something was this: what is popular--is there anything popular--that's at all anti-dystopic?  What, I thought, is the opposite of all this dystopia?  (Linguistically speaking, I know the answer is utopia...but for a little while I was stumped about how one would generically answer this question.)

And then it hit me as I watched the season 2 premiere of Once Upon a Time: duh, the answer is fairy tales.

They never fully go out of style; they get adapted and re-adapted; they almost always follow the same general plans.  They're stark: black and white, good and evil.  Hey look, this is the evil queen.  She's bad.  Hey look, this is Snow White.  She's good.  

No in between, only temporary unhappiness, and lots of happy ever after.  Most of the time.

And I guess I just had to write this up to reassure myself that not all of the popular books of the moment are about the world going to hell in a handbasket (or worse).

In Which I Tell You Why I Will Never Finish The Casual Vacancy

Life is too short, people.  It's too short to read books that you don't enjoy reading all the way through.

Which I suppose could be considered an odd perspective coming from someone who recently decided to re-read books that she read in school and positively and fearsomely hated, but I feel that's a different story.  Some of those books just weren't given a fair shake back then for whatever reason.

But here's the thing about J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, or at least the first one hundred pages or so of it: I just kept waiting for something to happen.  And nothing did.  (There's a joke in an episode of Gilmore Girls where the characters are making fun of The Donna Reed Show: remember that episode where the dad came home from work and was upset because dinner wasn't ready and nothing happened?  Remember when Donna tried to bake a cake and nothing happened?  That's what the first bit of this book felt like.)

Well, strictly speaking, that's not fair.  One major event happened, really the event that sparks the novel's title: someone dies.  So in all fairness I would describe the first bit of the book thus: someone dies, and then nothing happens, except that everyone somehow mostly internally reacts to the death and then there's some blahblahblah about local politics.

You might be thinking that I was unwilling to give this book a fair shake because it's not Harry Potter, but that's not even a little bit the case.  I don't like this book because it's dull.  Nothing that's going on in this first bit makes me want to keep reading.  As of where I stopped, there's only a whisper of a plot and I don't have any faith at all that it will ever reach normal speaking volume.

I could possibly, potentially, maybe get behind some of these characters--well, at least one that I can see--but nothing has given me reason to.  And I have no reason to carry on reading this book when I could be reading something else I'll enjoy more.

So that's my two cents, in the event you were debating whether to pick up this book.

(I didn't post this on the book blog as it seemed decidedly unfair to review a book without reading it all the way through.  And I didn't want to read the book all the way through to post an opinion.)

I somewhat recently read an interview where Rowling stated she's sure she'll find her way back into children's books.  I have great faith in what she might add to that particular genre, mostly because you don't find a lot of children's books where nothing much happens.

On Readwalking, or Why I'm Sometimes a Little Cowardly

Sometimes I wonder if I keep doing the same things I always do because there's a certain comfort to monotony.  Mind you, I'm not thinking right now "Oh, hey, I am going to write a blog that sings praises to boringness!" but I am thinking that there's a lot that I--and I'm sure other people--choose not to do because it's unknown.  And because there's a certain amount of safety in a pattern of routine.

Safety, I say, because I have become comfortable enough that I have started a practice that was much more common to myself when I lived at home with my parents: I now feel that I am familiar enough with my environment to walk home from Trax while still reading my book. 

I've lived in the same place for more than four years now, and it hasn't changed much at all, aside from someone finally finishing the renovation on a house on the corner of my street.  And, I guess, they are almost done with a new building that's kitty-corner from my Trax stop.  But the route home has become well-trodden now, and a few weeks ago I was very into my reading, and I just kept reading because I knew my feet would take me where I need to go.

Before you start worrying too much, please know that I'm not so dumb that I get so absorbed as to not pay attention to walk signals.  I'm more than glad to put the book down while I'm crossing streets.

As an added bonus, apparently I'm a source of entertainment as well.  The following day, as I walked home with my nose firmly stuck in my book, I passed an old man working in his yard.  He glanced at me, took a good look at what I was doing, and promptly burst into laughter.  Even better, after laughing, he just went back to work without trying to figure out anything else about me through conversation.

Of course, I don't know that you really have to have a conversation with someone who walks and reads to figure something out about them: you've already seen.

Anyway, the point of telling you about my readwalking is that I've reached a comfort level wherein I feel pretty safe with my current surroundings and circumstances. Some of them, anyway.  And I sometimes wonder if it's not to my detriment.  This is why: I don't like threatening my own safety.  So even though I may find that there are things I'm experiencing discomfort or unhappiness with, I don't want to change them, because changing them has the potential to change my safety zone and to make it much less safe.

I suppose it's self-preservational, but it's also an instinct I'm not entirely sure how to fight.  Growth involves change.  Progress implies movement.  And I'm not sure how much movement can come from within the safety of routine.

Every so often I invariably conclude I need to find a way to make a change, to shake up my life a little, or maybe to let someone else shake it up for me.  I just need to find a safe yet unsafe way to do it.

If anything such thing is possible.

Thoughts about Dystopia

Is it just me, or does the popular young adult literature of the moment all seem a little...less than idealistic?  Of course it's not just me.  Haven't you noticed?  Dystopia has been all the rage of late.  I'll readily grant that each individual novel I've read (the first few that pop into mind are The Hunger Games, Veronica Roth's Divergent, Ally Condie's Matched, and Caragh O'Brien's not-yet-fully-comple Birthmarked trilogy) has been differently dystopic.  But they're all dystopic nonetheless. 

And I find myself wondering: why dystopia?  Why now?  Why so many?  And again, more emphatically: why dystopia?

I often find myself wondering if this may be a way we content ourselves with the current state of the world: yes, we say to ourselves, it's bad.  But it's not this bad.  A reassurance, if you will, that things could always be worse.  Perhaps reassurance is the wrong word; this would seem an instance where there's a world of difference between saying we see a bright side and saying that we see a less dark side.

It's also easy to look at these as morbid thought-experiments.  If society started restricted this, if we no longer could think of that, if somehow we managed to restructure everything completely...this fascinates me, because I feel as though utopias of any kind are also thought-experiments.  Cause and effect: if we caused this, what effects would it have?  Except that right now doesn't seem to be the time for speculating what would happen if we found a way to feed everyone or if a fountain of youth existed or any...happy...thought experiment.  Instead the thought experiment generally seems to be what if somehow the world ended, the apocalypse came, etc.

But then, and I suppose this might be the optimist in me peeking out, I wonder if these books aren't so popular because of the type of conflict that it allows a hero/heroine to rise above.  Could it be possible these concepts are idealism in cynicism's clothing, teaching us that any of us might rise to our potential in even the worst of times?

I find that I can't decide, and so I take the only rational approach I can think of: upon exiting dystopia, I choose a happier environment to lose myself in for a while.  I read a happier book.

On Being Patient

I don't like it.

But if that were all I were thinking about, this would be a short blog post.  I really don't like it.

And so I find myself learning it anyway.  Isn't it funny how life works that way?

If you spoke with anyone who knows me and who has had sustained interactions with me, I tend not to think this is a word often used to describe me.  I am many things, but I am not always the most patient person.  Once, when my mom told me she thought me to be patient, I questioned her realization she was speaking to the right child.  She then told me about specific ways in which she thought I'd been patient and I said, oh, ok, I guess that's true.  But here's the thing: none of those specific ways involved people.

So okay, I think, I'm good at being patient with things, but I'm unsure that's a helpful form of patience to have.

There's no need to go into any detail, but I'm learning more patience with people--with myself and with other people.  And I hate it, because you know how you end up learning more patience?  Any patience that you innately have gets tried.  And tried.  And then tried some more.  Ergo the hate.

And then what happens is that I find myself struggling to have patience with the process of gaining patience, which just adds insult to injury...but maybe helps with the whole process (even if it seems mean and meta.)