Traveling Alone

I just finished a pretty good book called Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. It's about a 13 year old British kid named Jason. There are thirteen chapters, one for each month he's 13, going from January to January. It's pretty nifty. Because each chapter reads kind of like a short story, I can't really explain the book better than that, except to say that it can be funny or scary, happy or sad, but it constantly keeps you involved and concerned for the main character. Here are a few out-of-context quotes that I made sure to remember:

• "Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right."
• "Often I think boys don't become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man's mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there."
• "Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one's new lover in an old café, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is."
• "The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I'll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars're rooms. So are woods. Skies're ceilings. Distances're walls. Wombs're rooms made of mothers. Graves're rooms made of soil."

So there's some pretty nifty stuff in there.

I've been working at my community theater, but we're running out of projects because we work so quickly and diligently! We'll see what happens next.

I miss my friends. I hate thinking that I won't get to see any of you until the middle of August. But I guess another way of looking at it is that I'm half-way there. I had hoped to go to Paris to meet my friend Jon for a day or two, but that isn't going to work out, due to reasons beyond my control. That is to say, my parental units axed the plan. They've got some problem with me traveling alone - apparently it isn't safe. Which, really, is just stupid because I'd only be alone for an hour or two before meeting up with Jon, and Paris isn't anything I can't handle. Anyway, I'm pissed about it, but what can I do? Keep sitting around here, I guess, even if that means growing increasingly frustrated by my family, like usual. I think the problem may be that I'm traveling alone already.

Which reminds me, by the way, I'm sorry to anyone I haven't kept in touch with as well as they would like because that probably means I haven't kept in touch as well as I would like, either. I just don't realize it. I'm gonna try to get on that this weekend. But then, I suppose if we haven't been in touch, you probably aren't even reading this. Oh, whatever.

Happy birthday to Ian and Wyatt and whoever I may have missed.

Much love.