Ms. Cranky

When I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, I relinquish a significant amount of control to the universe, and my day becomes all about this hopeless power struggle. I wish to claim autonomy over my life, and the universe wishes to push me around and poke fun at me. As the day progresses, I become increasingly cranky, disgruntled, and, most of all, stupid. I mean really, which person in her right mind dares take part in a tug-o-war with the cosmos?

Exactly.

Gelassenheit.

We call it odious

Blame it on my shelteredness and innocence (and therefore on my stupidity) but I choose to be adamant in my belief that, more often than not, what we suspect as unctuousness and forced familiarity could very well be just friendliness- sincere, well-meant, and wholehearted friendliness- pure and simple. I wonder about this intense aversion to congenial behavior. I wonder about this inclination to think the worst in people. A smile too many or too eager, or a story a tad too revealing for our comfort, and a person is suddenly a social pariah. This is exasperating! Not everyone is out to get us; some people are actually quite decent. Some people actually mean well. Why, then, do we put up a defense so impenetrable, so unforgiving, so fatal? Why do we refuse to let anybody in without a fight?

Why does mankind choose to persecute itself?

On My Final Weekend of Lethargy

"Don't let the victor belong to the spoils."
--Anthony Patch, The Beautiful and Damned

I am down to my last two days of summer vacation, and I can't say I can complain. Three whole weeks of glorious inactivity are already too generous a gift, I'm sure you would agree. I think it's high time I am unfrozen from my stupor.

To make the most of my remaining days as a free woman, I am basking in F. Scott Fitzgerald's genius. The Beautiful and Damned is just exquisite! My favorite writer (This Side of Paradise has elevated him to the ranks of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton) is simply incapable of disappointing the reader, I must say. Literary experts invariably consider his The Great Gatsby as the perfect novel; in my opinion, his other works are definitely not far behind.

I'm about two-thirds through the novel, and I'm getting quite impatient. You see, what I really want to do is to devour it. I want to read it with abandon. I do not want to pause to catch my breath or to intensively digest a phrase. What I really want to do is to read the book as I would read Sweet Valley Twins when I was a child. I want to lose myself in its pages.

While getting engrossed in a novel as lovely as The Beautiful and Damned might seem most natural, I find that, sadly, I am now incapable of experiencing that. You see, for some years now, I have been slave to this rather annoying compulsion to consult the thesaurus for every single unfamiliar word I encounter in texts. I seem to have lost faith in context clues. This endless shift between the novel and the thesaurus keeps me from succumbing to the book's hypnotic powers.

This compulsion is a most arduous and time-consuming task, and, I have to say, Fitzgerald's eloquence isn't helping at all. He says garrulous and loquacious when he means talkative, and writes stentorian when he could easily say loud. My unsophisticated vocabulary is obviously not prepared for great books. It is highly possible that I am actually spending more time with my thesaurus than the novel.

Oh Fitzgerald, if your stories weren't so compelling (and you, so cute).