Soliloquy

3/04

I read the Lord of the Rings before the movies came out. I remember having The Hobbit in my lap on an airplane trip, and someone asking me what I was reading. On my reply, I merely got a shrug, and an "Oh. I've heard of that, I think." I regard the effect of the movies with a bit of ambivalence. On one hand, I'm glad that it's gotten the wonderful attention and audience it deserves, but I feel annoyed at people who like it just from the movies. Especially girls who would have no interest whatsoever if it weren't for a certain tall, elegant blond elf. I faithfully read passages describing the long journey across the mountains, the bloody battles, I had visions of hobbits as short, hairy-footed, and with a tendency for obesity, because that's how they were described. I had a copy of a book with a painting of Legolas on the front and he looked hideous, let me tell you. Whitish-grey hair, bangs, brown cloak that laced up the front. And I still liked the books, for the adventure, for the language, for the message. That means I deserve Legolas more than any non-nerdy fan girl, damnit!

Why do I find guys with pointy ears 10 times more hot? Do pointy ears provide any selective advantage over regular ones? I already have lots of strange criteria for what I like in guys. It's just my luck that now I've added one to the list that I really won't be able to find in any guy. I have to confess that my taste in guys is really strange. For example, my first kiss ever was from my best friend in the first grade. He got into trouble all the time. He ate grass. He ate ants. He disrupted the class and drove the teachers crazy. He made me laugh. He made his mother go crazy with wonder when he told her he wanted to take ballet because I was taking it *sigh* What can I say? I like bad boys.

I also like cello players. There's something about the dark mellow sound of the instrument, the way most cello players close their eyes and sway back and forth to the music, so expressive, so absorbed, that makes me swoon, and want to tell them, "Take me now! I'm yours."

I miss the first grade. I miss recess. I miss playing on the swings, feeling the wind blowing through my hair. I miss flipping over on the monkey bars so many times that I would go dizzy and enjoying every bit of it. I am a first grader trapped in an18 year old body. I am soooo immature. I love Hello Kitty. I own 1, 2, 3 Hello Kitty purses, a Hello Kitty alarm clock, doorbell, night light, calendar. . . The Hello Kitty things I own embarrass my mother, so she has to steer me away anytime we see a Sanrio store. I still sleep with a stuffed sheep. His name is Wooly.

And I still love children's books. I like the simplicity of the stories, with the hints of underlying complexity. I like the vividness, excitement, imagination, the pictures. I used to volunteer in the children's library when I was in highschool. It was the best job ever. The kids knew they could ask me for recommendations, because I remember each children's book I read growing up, and why I liked it, and my favorite parts. And better still, they could give _me_ recommendations for what I would enjoy reading, and why, and _their_ favorite parts, since I wasn't so up to date on all the new children's authors. Every day after I finished reshelving, I would go sit in the couch in the corner with a stack of books they insisted I should read.

One of my favorite books that I read as a child was "Totto-chan: A little girl at the window." It was written by a famous Japanese talk-show host as a recollection of her childhood. She was a bright, sunny, exuberant little girl, but unfortunately her first grade teacher didn't know how to deal with all her energy and was so frustrated that she insisted on having Totto-chan expelled. However there was an educator who was developing a new kind of school, with an experimental sort of education style and much less formal sort of setting. And here, Totto-chan was able to develop both into a person who could deal with other people but without having to suppress her nature. The stories she tells are so charming, with so much genuinity, and yet so simple, so that I could understand them as a child. But now I read them and am filled with awe by how she can say so much with so little. The words are very few and very aptyly chosen. Her language is so delicate that it can hardly be considered prose. The whole book reads like a haiku to me, like a poem. My aspiration is to live my life simply, like a poem, like a child, and in 30 years remember my childhood so strongly that I can write a book on it too.

Maybe it makes me sound overly experienced if I say my first kiss was in the first grade. It is not so. There were 13 years between that kiss and my next real one. But, of no consequence. My next kiss was out of a poem. Literally. I had a crush on my best friend, though I was afraid to say so. One night we were talking about poetry, and he wanted to read some of mine. I've been suckered into a poetry circle that sends out lines and has us complete them. The line this time around was, "You kiss like a different ___ every time." I finished it, "You kiss like a different punctuation mark every time" and wrote short stanzas, each using exclusively 1 punctuation mark, and each describing a kiss that worked like that punctuation mark. That was the only poem I had available for him to read. He smiled warmly as he was reading it and came closer, saying, "How would a comma be? Like this?" I laugh back. He pauses and whispers, "You kiss like a different day each time".

Another reason I like poetry is that I like vagueness, possibilities for interpretation, so each person can bring something to the poem and get something very much their own out of it. I like open endings. Because of their vagueness I can at least still enjoy a poem after reading it several times; songs as well, after listening to them several times. But most books I can only enjoy fully once, and maybe that's why I enjoyed working in the library so much. If I can't enjoy a book again, I can at least feel warm and fuzzy inside to imagine how someone else will enjoy reading it for the first time, and if I've made a good recommendation and they enjoy it, maybe remember it still 15 years later, just as I do.

My greatest fear in the world is a silly one. It is that I will read every beautiful poem in the world, listen to every beautiful song, so many times that I will be tired of them and I will have nothing else to enjoy. I guess it just means I will have to read slowly, celebrating the uniqueness and sound of every word, every phrase, chewing on it slowly and then swallowing, so that I can keep up with the rate that more good books are produced. And then maybe write some of my own. 

a.w.


back