Recording further ideas for Marsilani

Okay, brainstorming session. Transcribing session. Whatever.

For "The Distance": Christine is wrestling with the guilt of having committed an abortion, and being a devout Catholic... She has been wrested from her "old context," her old school, and of course, her old "boyfriend," in order to make a "clean break" (another "abortion" of sorts) with her past. "It has less to do with being Catholic, and more to do with being Japanese," she realizes. The hypocrisy in that...

In the new school, Mililani, while pining away, and hoping to reestablish contact with her old beau, she "falls prey to" the infatuations of some idiot kid (okay, me) who fancies himself the modern day version of Don Quixote...

...you know, side note here, it's funny. We say "quixotic," we imagine that Don Quixote represents the ideal of chivalry, perhaps through rose-colored glasses, as though he lived in a quaint ("easy") time; but he himself lived in, shall we say, a "post-modern" age, a time that was a tarnishing of the supposed golden age of knighthood and chivalry, a Spain that was dusty with sin and corruption and hungry for the end of the world. The story comes alive if you read it, not from a distance, but as being concerned with YOUR issues, YOUR questions...

Central to the relationship between Christine and Randy is the image of the egg. The egg is a tool in some Guidance (?) / Health (?) classes to serve as a (cautionary) exercise in the responsibilities of raising a child... I have a vision of a demonstration of how to hollow an egg as being particularly upsetting to Christine (poking holes, "blowing" the stirred up contents out)...

An empty egg, a shell, this is precisely the way Randy relates to Christine, an appreciation only of surfaces. He himself, in his role as Don Quixote, is but a surface (in the "chivalry" and "knights" context, he is but an empty "suit of armor"). It is when the egg "cracks," that he comes to some realization of the inappropriateness and naivete of his "model" of relating...

More on this story in the next thought, which deserves an entry of its own...