i just watched "perks of being a wallflower." good movie... if not for the "mix tapes," i would've mistook it for a contemporary film (but then again, i'm out of the loop, fashion-wise... and maybe teenage angst and reflection are passe, and went out with the breakfast club). i of course kept springboarding off the movie to my own life as a wallflower (movies put things so well; in reality, they just called me a nerd), but of course, in real life, things are so much more watered down that you can't taste the wine. i had no intense secret, i had no colorful upperclassmen friends, i had no cool mentor teacher... and, while i did have crushes, they were more pathetic than life-altering. there's a point where your isolation/madness can define you for good or for evil (or, to put it in less stark, high contrast ways: pathos or pathetic). i think i fell more into the wastelands, or t.s. eliot's the hollow men; in my highest moments, i was the heighty ambiguity and ambivalence of w.b. yeats's irish airman. i remember so many times when i went off into the wilderness (kipapa gulch, or, later, into snowy graveyards), there was no one who would find me, and no one who would give enough of a shit to write me into some kind of narrative.
i suppose in that sense, and for a certain kind of story, it is your friends who make you.
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we put together my son's b-day party this weekend. he's into minecraft, so i tried to make things minecraft-related. i drew pictures of different things from the game onto post-its, and put the post-its into black balloons. then, for one of the games, these kids had to grab the balloons and pop them. there were scores associated with the different post-its, so the team with the most points won a prize. i think the kids liked it. i noticed all the kids (and there was a kind of range of ages) were getting into it. which was the point.
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at times, i'm not sure if i know where i'm going. but i try to assure myself that, at least, my heart is in the right place.
