The Reader and the guy reading

I never really thought about The Reader as a separate entity before, but as I read books more closely, I've started to notice that there's something people tend to do when reading.

They become the characters. Which, I suppose, is kind of okay. Like, I love relating to characters, and putting myself in them, because it's nice to feel the experience of a book that way. It makes the meaning and all much clearer and personal, you know?

I guess what I'm trying to say is don't put the characters in you. Well, not exactly. I guess you could compare character and book situations to yourself, and see how they apply to you. But I don't think that's the point of an author's writing of a book. I don't think the author's primary goal is to, like, tell you that this is your life, that this is something like you. Because it's not. Not every story or character or setting or anything is applicable to everyone. I guess there are times when you notice similarities, but in general, I try to--not distance--like, read it on a personal level sometimes, but also on a more this-is-the-story-and-I-know-it's-a-story level.

I don't know a specific situation to depict this, but I think it kind of makes sense. Either way, there's something to get from looking at who we are as a reader, which I don't really blow off as useless pretentious literary crap anymore.

Hey notice how I didn't talk about the New Year or resolutions or the impending loneliness or the future or anything, but instead, on New Year's Eve, talking about reading a book. What a nerd, lol.

College Expectations from a seventeen-year-old

Here are some things I expect college will do to revolutionize my life (because after all, it's where I live and what's around me that affects how content I am, not my own personal peace of mind, of course):

1. Better food - sorry, I just had dinner, and it left something to be desired; I think I'll heat up some pizza later, probably.
2. Better education - forgive me for putting education below food—usually I'm not an advocate for prioritizing food, since personally I don't care for it except that it fills the physical emptiness in me, which I suppose I should be kind of grateful for, since it's a hell of a lot easier to fill than the emotional and mental emptiness that I'm left to contemplate; nevertheless, I do expect the quality of education to be vastly superior to that of my pathetic high school, since I'll either be at liberty to choose whatever the hell I want to learn about, or otherwise compelled to study things that will, in a somewhat pretentious but true way, broaden my mind to new perspectives about things I'd otherwise not care to know about either way, it's better than my education heretofore; this much we have established.
3. Freedom!!!!!! - man, I am all over the place with my priorities today; here I am talking about food and education when it's clear that the number one thing I want from college is freedom, that great value so prided and protected by our great, prideful, overprotective country—yes, I do want to get the hell out of here, which incidentally leads me to my next point:
4. I do want to get the hell out of here - pretty self-explanatory; if you've ever lived in a small town or something of the likes, like a crappy part of the country, or just a bad school, or even being around those annoying kids who do nothing but remind you of how much you want to get out of here (it's like a big, meta circle)—but you know that if you do get out, everything will be solved, because, well... [see INTRODUCTION TO THIS LIST] because I think in college I'll have a better—
5. social life - yeah, no hiding it, my social life isn't the best as it is right now at school, etc. I mean I suppose part of it is my fault, but really, I like to blame it on the ineptitude of my peers—to think that it is really they who are lacking in intellect or open-mindedness or interest, or excessing in pretentiousness or snobbishness—and I feel like this will change, and is not something universal in every slice of human population. (to be fair, this one's kind of justified, because assuming I get into somewhere good, the quality of discourse and social activity will probably be more to my suiting.)
6. I will do stuff and not just complain about it.

Red Green

[edited from this by Esther]

I know; I’m excited about my baby too; I really am… really, really, excited… can’t wait, can’t wait…

Red Green was the dog that we had when we were little. Hank probably—Hank was probably five when we got him, and so I was like seven or eight, and Red Green—we got him for Christmas, that’s why he was called Red Green, and he was kinda red ‘cause he was a miniature dachshund; but red green, you know, Christmas. And we'd already had a snake, um, a garter snake called Blue Green, and, uh, it just seemed like the next logical decision. And Red Green was this little miniature dachshund; he weighed like seven-and-a-half pounds, and he was, like, the worst dog in the world. And I love—I can love a bad dog: Willy [turns to Willy] barks a lot, and he runs away, and he’s very skittish, and pissy, and everything. But Red Green was, like, an aggressively, horrible dog.

Like, I remember one time, Hank and my parents went to England, and for some reason I didn’t go; I was working at Steak 'n Shake, and I think, like, I needed to, like, finish my summer at Steak 'n Shake to have spending money for college, or something. So I was probably 18—I think it was my freshman year of college. And, um, my mom and dad and Hank went to England, and, um, for, like, three or four days. And I was stuck in Orlando, working at Steak 'n Shake—working the graveyard shift at Steak 'n Shake, um—Kayley, last night, worked the graveyard shift of "Project for Awesome," as did many of you. And, so, um, me and Red Green were alone together in the house. And Red Green—if I did not get up at five thirty in the morning, um, uh, on my off days, and walk Red Green, he would jump into the—up onto the bed; he would wake me up by pawing at my face; then he would jump back down onto the carpet of my bedroom, and he would stare at me. And he would pee. And then, on the days that weren’t my off days, when I had to work from midnight to eight am, uh, which is the time when dogs are usually asleep, and able to, like, hold their, uh, bladders, I would come home to, like, not, like, one accident, but, like, seventy-two separate accidents, uh, scattered about the house. And it wasn’t that Red Green was incontinent; he knew that it pissed us off when he peed, and so he peed, because he liked to make us mad.

So—that’s not the story, though; the story is this:

When I was about twelve years old, I had an 8-bit Nintendo—one of the original Nintendos. You—you know what I’m talking about? You probably don’t. You’re like, “Oh, original Nintendo, you mean the, uh, you mean the Wii.” No—before there was a Wii there was a Super Nintendo, and before there was that, there was the original Nintendo, which was just, like, a grey box, and it had this little door and it flipped open, and then you put the game cartridge inside—you probably do know because of James the Nintendo Nerd—and then you would—or Angry Video Game Nerd—and then you would put—you’d put the video game cartridge in, and then you’d press down, and then you’d close that, um, that little flap at the top, and then you’d hit power, and you’d play the game.

Okay. So, um, sometimes—because I’m more of a winger than a planner, as I just learned taking that baby test—I would, uh, play my game, and then I would take it out—megariffix32: just like me! That’s not an old Nerdfighter. I would say that that is a, uh, early, early, still a young—what is—what is—if you’re not middle-aged, I guess you’re early-aged—so yeah, the early-aged Nerdfighter. All right so, I would—I would take my game out at the end of my playing Blades of Glory or whatever; I would take my game out, and sometimes I would leave the little, grey flap open, right? And then I’d put my game away, and I would go to bed, because I played from, you know, six o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night, uh, breaking briefly for lunch. You have to understand that, like, when video games—[laughs] like, when the Nintendo first arrived in homes, uh, everyone in the world was, like, I don’t want to ever do anything other than this, um—it was so much cooler, and more exciting, than anything that had ever happened to any of us. So anyway, uh, I left the little flap open. Red Green….

My brother was at summer camp—Hank was at summer camp. My parents are not really practical jokers; they’re funny people, but they’re not practical jokers. And the house was locked. And I loved my Nintendo more than I loved anything—and than I loved anything in the whole world, at that point. Like, maybe more than I loved my—my family. I loved my Nintendo, and I would never do anything to harm it.

I go to bed one night with the flap up; I wake up the next morning, you know, the very first thing that I do, before I brush my teeth, is I run into the living room, and I grab Blades of Glory, or Double Dribble, or whatever it was, and I would pull it out of its black Nintendo case, and I’d go to put it, and RED GREEN HAS POOPED INSIDE MY NINTENDO. I don’t mean that he pooped next to the Nintendo, or that he pooped on top of the Nintendo, he pooped inside the game slot of the Nintendo. There was poop in there: Red Green poop. Because he knew I loved it! And so he sidled up to it, and he turned his bottom around, and angled it so that he could, like, projectile poop inside the Nintendo.

Now, the other possibilities—what are the other possibilities, right? The other possibilities are—somebody says, “Red Green ftl.” Do you mean, “Red Green French The Llama”? Sorry, that’s a joke that’s from, like, two days ago; I’ve been on for a while…. The other possibilities are that my parents put the Red Green poop inside the Nintendo, which they have consistently denied, and they have also, convincingly, said, “Why would we put poop inside your Nintendo? We knew you loved it and it shut you up—and distracted you… from bothering us.” My brother was at summer camp; there’s no way he could have done it—he would’ve, God knows… crazy bastard. But, um, the only person... who could’ve done it is me—and I would never do it; I loved my Nintendo! The doors were locked. Either someone broke into my house, stole nothing, took Red Green’s poop in the house—which God knows there was plenty of—and put it inside the Nintendo. Or, Red Green actually, literally, pooped inside my Nintendo.

This is a true story… this is a true story… That is the kind of dog that Red Green was. Um, the other—Red Green was such a bad dog… I can’t get over how bad of a dog he was. How bad was he? Red Green was such a bad dog… that um…

a highly incomplete reading list for 2010

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers

started in 2009:

Repotting Harry Potter

Geektastic

How to Read Literature Like a Professor

some leftovers from 2009's epic fail also idk random "literary" novels:

The Color Purple
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume 2, by M.T. Anderson
Feed, by M.T. Anderson
Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junat Díaz
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

The Picture of Dorian Gray
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

(lots of dfw stuff maybe?)
Everything And Nothing, A Compact History of Infinity, by David Foster Wallace

gonna tackle in AP Lit anyway:
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
1984
Brave New World
The Great Gatsby

everything by:

John Green

Maureen Johnson

Scott Westerfeld

David Levithan

some new guys:

Breakfast Of Champions

A Confederacy Of Dunces

Deadeye Dick

Love Is A Dog From Hell

Everything is Illuminated

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

How I Live

The Book Thief

Bill Bryson?

Spaceman Blues

Liberation

So You Want To Write
A Separate Peace
A Portrait of the Artist a Young Man
A Suitable Boy
The Color Purple
The Overcoat

some books on the topics of:

literary theory

critical theory

postmodernism

editing and proofreading

publishing

education

religion

^lotsa very short introductions

other stuff:

Langston Hughes

Raymond Carver

fun:

The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Extraordinary Chickens

This is Why You're Fat

Sunny Side Down: Tales of Mere Existence

LOLcat Bible

Cyanide & Happiness

just standard:

MLA Handbook, and Manual of Style

Youtube: an insider's guide to climbing the charts

oh, and of course, probably during the summer or something,

Harry Potter:

Sorcerer's Stone

Chamber of Secrets

Prisoner of Azkaban

Goblet of Fire

Order of the Phoenix

Half-Blood Prince

Deathly Hallows

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Quidditch through the Ages

Tales of Beedle the Bard

---

feel free to leave suggestions, obnoxious and sincere, in the comments or, like, something

There's like not much I can do about some things

I mean...

I tell myself that, you know, people are okay at school and not utterly horrible maybe, but I know that this isn't what I want.

I tell myself that my parents aren't complete morons whom I do not want in charge of my life because I'm nearly an adult and I'm tired of them messing everything up, but I know they are.

I tell myself I have direction in life and that things are fitting in all right and that I'm not as completely screwed over as I think, but I know I probably am.

I tell myself that there's no way that so many people can, well, kind of genuinely like me for who I am and my interests and habits and personality and choices, because really, who would? Surely it's all a joke like the rest of my life, and surely I'm just as insignificant and crappy as I've always thought, because come on,

but then I know that they do.