For instance, I was driving for a couple of hours yesterday. It's not such an uncommon situation, except the timing: for all intents and purposes, I drove for an hour when I'd been awake for less than fifteen minutes, spent the day at the mall with a friend, then drove that hour back home. I'd been thinking--and dreaming--about various topics, some heavy and some just muse-worthy, the day and night before. Shopping and lunch yielded the usual wide variety of subjects to discuss and consider, some that we'd hit several times before and some brand new. The ride home was fraught with recriminations, pointless longing, fear and worry, and some literally bumpy roads just to keep things fresh.
What am I left with? Well...
- I wish I could go back and make things right with JJ. The spectacle of the way that went wrong was all my fault.
- I wish I could go back and drive a heavy truck over the dirty, lying Mormon.
- I wish I'd stayed one more night in Chicago.
- I wish I'd taken at least one photo in Dallas!
- I wish I'd bought a lot less furniture in the last ten years.
- I wish I could see into the future, to know if the recriminations and prognostications and longing are the product of what actually will be, or just of some potential that cannot ever be realized.
- I wish that the faith that my friends have in me could translate to the one great chance that I need, with the right people.
[the title quotation is by Scott Westerfeld, from Uglies]
Well, Scott W is absolutely correct. And when you find your off-switch, you could probably market the knowledge of its location, make a million-kabillion bucks and retire from the world to write poetry and pet cats and go shopping with me. But you'd still be you, after all that.
ReplyDelete(and everyone's off-switch is different anyway, so I'm not buying a copy of your book on said location unless someone asks for it at my library :P )
WV: eabole
"eabole" sounds like a terrible little organism with an evil agenda.
DeleteYour second paragraph pretty much guarantees that a board member will hear tell of such a thing and demand that you order multiple copies right away. :P
And, should that occur, I'll install a household biohazard containment field in which the cats can peacefully shed their dander, far away from you.
"for all intents and purposes"... I'm so glad you wrote this because I always thought it was for "all intensive purposes" and have probably been hearing it said wrong all my life.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few words and phrases like that for me, too--even when I hear them "the right way" I'm still hearing them the wrong way, the way my brain has always interpreted them. The book title Icy Sparks, for example, has always seemed like it should be I See Sparks. I also can't ever type The Lovely Bones without adding an 'r' before the 's'....
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