Thursday, July 08, 2010

Yin V. Yang

Conflicted, I am.

Shoulder #1: I love to read, and so when I see others doing it - the warm and fuzzies, they get a tingling. I occasionally ride the bus to campus, and see folks toting hardbacks, and trades, and airport softcovers galore. My curiosity is generally peaked when I see what people are reading: what are they thinking? Who recommended this? What do they think about such and such, and this and that, and that? Sometimes, they're reading something I've read too - this sends curiosity into overdrive. Do they see the same scene unfold in their head? Do they see the same monster at the end of the book? There's a special sanctity to the shared experience of reading a quality piece of lit, and then connecting with another who has read that same set of words.

Shoulder #2: Frak you, you pretentious ass-hat. Take the dust jacket off your stupid Malcolm Gladwell coffee coaster and stop showing me how cooooooool and in-the-know you are. Read your book ALONE while you're in bed with your spreadsheets and whatever's on Leno tonight, and stop putting it up on frakking display for everyone else to see. Take your trade-sized, movie poster edition, copy of "Eclipse", and  read it huddled over while wearing fingerless gloves like any respectable emo kid would - you stupid raging hipster. And you - you with your "Girl Who Played With Something-Or-Other" jerk-off...you...you're too easy. Just go back to the American Apparel fitting room you crawled out of.

I am conflicted.

1 comment:

Fraske Designs said...

but i like malcom gladwell!