Part 1

I was a hungry reader when I was in the sixth grade. A book a week, at least. And I would read everywhere. House, car, store, church, night, day...and during English class. My teacher got irritated once in a while, but why did she care? I had already finished the reading assignment. I had already taken the vocabulary test eight times in my head. Anyway, anti-authoritarian gripes aside, I read a lot as a youngster. In case I didn't get that point across yet.

My body has changed since then, and I didn't really notice until I started doing something I haven't done in years: devouring books. Like most college students, I've read required literature and the odd novel, but after my freshman year of high school, I practically abandoned my protein-rich story diet. This summer, I made a conscious decision to read as often as possible, and I find myself noticing things about myself that I overlook every other minute of the day.

I used to read differently. Curled up. On my side. Turning over every fifteen, twenty minutes. Now that sort of thing doesn't fly on a couch that has insisted on staying the same size while my limbs stretched themselves to match my height. Now I pose myself in a reclined sitting position, knees bent, a pillow between my thighs and the book if an obliging pillow can be found. This position is probably better for my posture, and for keeping earbuds from falling out, but it reminds me that I am older than I was.

I guess aging should be obvious, but I usually think of myself as a fixed point, as I suspect most people do. Of course people are aware that they have a past, and a future, and that their bodies can't be expected not to change, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who looks at himself in the mirror some mornings and is surprised that he isn't thirteen years old anymore.

As recently as a few months ago, I thought that there was some kind of definitive mental change that happened to a person that made him or her into an adult. Now I know that isn't true. The change doesn't happen to the person, it happens when people's expectations of the person change. The person himself does not grow up; his semi-artificial social status does. Older siblings who take care of younger brothers and sisters in the absence of significant parental involvement are great examples of the actual change. I think I once read someone else express the same idea, but I did not grok it.

Grok. A word I picked up from a book. That's another change in the way I read: I put the author's ideas in context with the rest of my world. Today, I read most of Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead and found myself extrapolating the situations of the characters into experiences I had dealt with in my own life. My middle school self would have read the book as a book, and when I finished it, it would be finished. Now, I allow my emotions to be guided by the author, and the ability to attach memories of emotions to a book allows me to both give my emotions an identity and think of literature as more than pure entertainment.

As I read over this piece up to this point, the paragraphs seem embarrassingly short. Oh well, I've never been much of a writer, only a good reader. And this post isn't for you, anyway. It's for me. Writing ideas down makes them easier to keep in my head, and writing them in a public place forces me to refine them into concepts that make sense and flow logically. Even if my prose chops are shoddy, I will have succeeded in organizing my thoughts a little better.

Part 2

I was supposed to play bass for the youth group on Tuesday, but there was some confusion about the drummer - i.e. no drummers showed up. The mix-up was actually good news for me, because I prefer to play the drums. I feel more involved.

However, putting myself behind the kit left a hole where a bass player should go, and guess what? - no other bassists showed up either. I could either play bass with my hands and use the bass drum and high hat with my feet, or I could teach one of the three guitar players some basic bass technique. Some (audibly) called it futile. I called it thrilling. It worked...passably. I had a lot of fun. The "bass player" managed to make the right sounds, and on my fretless bass, no less.

I love those high-pressure situations when I need to fill a functional gap and no course of action is possible except to rapidly teach someone a new skill. Spontaneous gap fillings are one of the primary reasons I stuck with Science Olympiad for four years. Somehow, I managed to find one of those moments at almost every competition, regardless of the team's level of preparedness. An amateur rock expert would be thrown into a bottle rocket event or something awesome like that. So many opportunities for gaining knowledge.

My love for those situations increases my frustration at people who refuse to believe that any kind of success is possible. I have seen too many of these crazy schemes succeed to put up with crap from people who insist that they will never work. No matter what, I must always try something, even if it means pulling out a guitar player and saying "Put your thumb here, and press the strings like this, and try to keep up." That's the sort of thing that makes people discover talents they didn't know they had, and to keep people from that knowledge, even by inaction, is borderline criminal.

I should have known better than to try to write a double post right before bed. I should sleep now.

Steve Dee linked me to a paper a few weeks ago. It described an abstract monster that had descended upon humanity the same way a Communist Party activist in the 60s would have described the evils of capitalism. Despite the authors' gesticulative style, I found myself agreeing with their major points: that a large portion of humankind, mostly the barely-comfortable portion, have descended into a state of listless, unchanging conformity, and demand that others do so as well. (If you like to read about interesting ideas, you can read the paper yourself. You'll have to wade through a few paragraphs of opaque abstractions, but everything will become clear eventually.)

One symptom of this pseudo-disease is that people forget about long periods of time, as if they were asleep. I feel that way about most of last week. I got up in the morning, sat in a chair for eight hours, came home, and read blogs until I went to bed early. Eventually, Steve snapped me out of it by unintentinally giving me a problem to work on, but Monday through Thursday don't really exist for me. It's as if those days don't exist in my past.

I think that if I'm not careful, much of my life will end up like Monday through Thurday of last week. If I don't find goals for myself, then I won't be motivated to do anything but be part of the producing-consuming economic machine, mindless and inane.

Fortunately, I think I can avoid that future. I'm already working to avoid it. Since I found myself listless when I ran out of goals, I set some new goals for myself. I'll be going to a Python programming conference in two weeks (PyOhio), and I'll be actively participating in a few ways, all of which require work. I have decided to do more reading, since my literary forays this summer have been great successes up to this point. To that end, I have finished three books in the past three days.

Despite these small, encouraging successes, I am afraid of becoming too comfortable here. My first few weeks back from Case, my head was a mess. I had just been cut off from most of the people I cared about.  I felt like my mind was full of dangling wires that used to connect to something but had been ripped away and left hanging in some dirty closet, firing pulses to a missing counterpart and getting no response. Now those wires have found new homes back inside me, and I have become an introvert again. I feel as though I belong here, that I have been here forever. I need to remind myself every few days that a better life is five weeks and a five hour drive away. I keep hiding myself from everyone here, but in a few weeks, I won't have to hide anymore.

Living here frustrates me. These people don't know how to deal with or understand each other. I am becoming part of their hypnotic routine. New stimuli are rare, and I have to find them through this tiny backlit panel. I would much rather interact with the world via my physical reality, not a keyboard and a screen. I want to use my arms and legs. Maybe I could find a club to join or something. Or go to a programming conference. Now there's an idea...

I apologize for the previous two paragraphs. I have averaged one good conversation or less per day for the past few weeks, and these things tend to crystallize inside me when I can't find some poor soul to commisserate with. Fortunately, I have this outlet, which still probably has ~zero readers, so I can pine to the empty air. Kind of like a pine-scented emo air freshener.

Part 2: Heinlein and Bukowski
Oh, didn't I mention that this post would be a three-parter? Well, I've been reading for three days straight - what did you expect?

On Saturday, I finished Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. I finally started to notice parts of his style - in particular, I noticed the way he spends the first half of a story setting up a world, and the second half making a point or making a story really matter.  After reading half of a novel, I feel like I know the main characters well enough to care about them, and so when Heinlein actually makes things happen to them, he provokes both mental and emotional responses in me. In the case of Starship Troopers, I was forced to think about my privileges as a citizen of a powerful democracy, and about social responsibilities that neither I nor most of my acquaintances ever bother to consider. When I finished the book, I realized that watching the Hollywood version of the book would probably mean nothing but pain for my poor, soggy brain, but someone will probably make me watch it anyway. Everything I have read about it makes me think that the movie is a totally soulless ripoff of some flashy-but-irrelevant plot points of Heinlein's story.

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship by Charles Bukowski carried me through Sunday. When I started reading it, I didn't realize that it was a posthumously-published collection of journal entries he had written over the three years before his death. By the time I had finished it, I felt as though I had sat been sitting in a hazy bar for two hours listening to some old drunk ramble on about life. I loved it.

With that context still fresh in my mind, I read Ham on Rye. Any decent person would be scandalized, but I thought it was great. For much of the book, I kept thinking, "What is he getting at?" Eventually, I stopped trying to understand, and when he finally let me go, I understood anyway. Don't ask me to explain.

Part 3: The Library
I left the house after dinner because I could. I had time to finish Ham on Rye before the library closed at eight, so I drove three blocks, parked, walked in, returned a stack of books, browsed for new books, found one, tucked it under Bukowski, sat down in a chair more suited to hold a human being than any in this house, and opened Bukowski up again for my last sprint.

About forty pages from the end, my father walked into the library to return some trendy books on management and pick up my brother's stack of CDs, which would be ripped and sent back within three days or so. He asked me if I was there because Phillip and the other animals were having band practice. "No, I'm just here," I said. I guess that was good enough. He left. I've been trying to stay away from sarcasm. I hope my tone was okay.

On to the next book...

I like it when a book shapes my personality.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein is shaping my personality imperceptibly right now. Some of his characters follow the Apple slogan "Think Different" more than any real person I know. I find myself thinking in paradigms used by Jubal Harshaw, or the Man from Mars, without consciously choosing to do so. I like it - it means I can change.

It's hard for novels to convince anyone of anything. Usually, deliberate attempts by authors to write persuasive novels alienate readers instead of drawing them in. I was subjected to too much "deep" literature in high school, and I am surprised to find that I'm being changed by a book I chose independently of an instructor.