Simple Things
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008It’s only been a day and I already feel a lot better. I guess yesterday’s sorrow was largely the result of sitting in a room by myself all day with no one to talk to that wasn’t behind the virtual chasm of cyberspace. When I’m alone too long, I tend to over think things, and I have a striking tendency to resort to pessimism under such circumstances. After a day at the job I don’t hate, I’ve had substantially less time to sit around and dramatize things, so I’m feeling a lot better. It certainly helped that all the small things fell into place in my favor, like, having a stranger give me a kind word on my blog. It’s like a reassuring smile, but on the internet.
People forget too often how it’s the simplest of things that bring joy to our lives. I of course count myself among the whole, but I was pleasantly reminded when I came home to my boyfriend’s computer casting an infinite banner of love and reassurance across the screen. It made me miss him even more to see that he was thinking of me and thought to remind me of it, even in such a small way, but while simultaneously stifling the pangs of longing. I really am lucky and I really need to stop forgetting it, lest I fall into a similar trap of misery and self loathing that my sister has so readily taken to.
With that, I’ve taken to one of my older hobbies, reading. It was more of an accident that I even picked up a book although I had considered it in a conversation last night, but while I was at my school’s computer lab today, I saw a box of books that were to be given away and I decided to have a look. I discovered two “erotic paranormal” books in a series by an author named Sunny, Mona Lisa Awakening and Mona Lisa Blossoming. At this point I haven’t been able to put it down save to perform the daily ritual of checking my internet sites.
At first I laughed at the pairing of eroticism with the paranormal, but then I recalled this series I collected in middle school and high school called The Last Vampire by Christopher Pike. I’d discovered the series in a similarly accidental way a long time ago during a trip with my parents when I was but a wee little preteen. We had paid a visit to a local library when we were visiting a relative and once we were several blocks away, I discovered the second book in the series on the ground. My parents were in a hurry to get somewhere so they didn’t bother to have me return it. I started reading it on the bus ride home and I was immediately drawn into it, even in spite of my age. I quickly forgot it about it, and while cleaning my room a year or so later, as always, I rediscovered the little treasure… only to forget about it again.
The weird thing was that later, in the seventh grade, I discovered the next book in the series, abandoned in the art classroom. Never one to pass up a free book (I used to love Scholastic RIF days) I grabbed it and continued with the series. Throughout high school, a friend helped me gather the series in its entirety and I devoured the books, rereading them again and again… until I discovered the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series by Louise Rennison and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (whom I would find out just now was responsible for the screenplay for the film adaptation of the musical Rent). Gossip Girl, however, was never my thing. The little suburban girls could live out their fantasies of life in the big city, but I’d already been there and as I was schooling with them for a momentary departure from said city - I didn’t need to pay a visit back to it, and certainly not as it was depicted in such an exaggeratedly ridiculous light. That’s right, I am not a fan.
Such are the wonders of reading. The books I found today have reinvigorated that same spark that I used to have for reading. I’ve always had a certain curiosity about the paranormal rather than a fear of it like some people have. I’ve always had this part of me that refuses to write these things off as fantasy. I like to imagine them as being real instead. It’s more fun that way. Honestly the naughty bits are not even the half of what makes the books intriguing to me. I just find the fact that people create whole mythologies on paper fascinating. Strangely enough though, Harry Potter never really grasped onto me in the same way. Anyway, I’m going to go back to reading now. Sex scenes in books are somehow hilarious.