Though I will. The other blog I'm managing will one day hold JPop songs I've translated and anime quotes and suchlike.
In the meantime, until the next fanciful shift in blog host, something I don't remember writing.
Maybe I repressed it. It sparks my old idealism: This was me:
The future is the best thing about life because it can be written like a good story, and good stories are simple, hopeful, clear. This humble creator would make her future a fairytale, suitable for little children, and like all good fairy tales, it would begin, “Once in a land, a long time ago…
…A girl graduated from Bronx Science, magna cum laude, born in a shower of confetti and board hats. She packed her suitcases, loaded up her car, and painted her face maroon and white—the Stanford colors. She got an education, picked her favorite flavor major, and waltzed out quickly with merry memories, a duffel bag, and a camera. (This is where things get interesting.)
This girl had been born with a horrible brain disease. Her parents despaired of her; the doctors were unsure what to do. The disease manifested in her thoughts; they gave her reality a soap-bubble tinge and sometimes she hallucinated. After all, she thought she could ‘capture beauty’ by trekking across America’s fifty states on foot. She thought this endeavor would encompass a ‘bohemian lifestyle.’ She thought she could be happy delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, or washing dishes in small towns far from home, she believed in hospitality and human goodness, and she even thought her sole pair of sneakers would last over miles of snow, mud and campground outhouses. They had diagnosed correctly; she was clearly insane. Yet they received postcards from her and read her blog, and indulged her fancies. They let her go. (This is the utopian version of the future, after all.)
One day she filled a thousand pages of a thousand virtual photo galleries, she looked at her videos and no longer remember where each one came from, and she frowned at the stranger beside her on the park bench because she wanted him to remind her of a comfortable old childhood friend. The friendly truckers and the sympathetic mothers no longer applauded her highway-sprinting exploits and chalked them up to the beautiful audacity of youth. They glanced away from her grinning shoes and said, ‘Maybe you should settle down. Maybe you should go home.’
So she did and she wrote a book. After that, she drew a story. Then a scene from Corpus Christi or Albuquerque would tickle her in her dreams and out of her fingers danced a little movie. Or a little song. In between, she dug up the scraps of cloth she found in Boise and sewed dresses. She walked her dog, and her cat. She dressed up as a hippie on spring mornings and spoke in a false accent to random people on the subway. Sometimes she sat by the window of a 24-hour café and painted the shifting shafts of streetlight and the slouching shadows that passed back and forth. She never hid her age for vanity. If she had children, she would spoil them rotten.
She would enjoy living forever; she would not resent dying either. Either way, despite her nonchalance about life, she signed up as an organ donor, bought copious amounts of sugar-free candy for the trick-or-treaters, and tried her best to be good. At her funeral, they sang ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Puff the Magic Dragon,’ after they commented on her eclectically colored fingernails. Her gravestone read ‘She Lived’ because that was what she did.
…She lived happily ever after.”
The creator is satisfied but the child has a problem with the story, as most children do. (Recall, if you may, “But why didn’t the three bears lock the door?” “But XYZ?”)
“Did the girl ever get cured?”
“Cured of what?”
“Her brain disease.”
“Oh.” There are good diseases. The creator has heard of a man who was born without any talent at standardized tests and academics, but he could sculpt the perfect likeness of anything he saw. She has heard of a woman who could see the color of any melody. And isn’t love a disease what with its feverish bouts of anxiety and confused passions? “No, she was never cured,” she replies matter-of-factly. “She was Idealistic until death.”
The child is satisfied and the creator goes back to her stories. She reads hunched over, because the shackles around her wrists are heavy after time. “Family” is engraved on the right cuff, “Fear” on the left. For the moment, though, external biddings of “Don’t go to a college too far. You must talk with us when you pick a career” and internal whispers of “You’re the biggest fool. What do you know about taxes and bills?” diminish into subconscious pattering, like the millionth raindrop’s half-hearted tap. Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, and Neil Gaiman all turned out all right, after all. She owes them her sanity; she will repay them with paving stones of words sealed with concrete devotion. Their merry path will continue through the dark woods of reality. She will repay them with her life.
When she gains possession of it. She sits on a blue chair, leafs through magazines and surreptitiously sketches unusual details. The creator is waiting to be born.
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