Things are wet here. The lake that used to be my backyard is back. There is also snow that is sort-of-melting, with the melting part of that last hyphenated word being more wishful thinking than not. I think we’re still below freezing and cloudy, so the snow may not be melting for a while yet. And things. There are always things. Hopefully next week I can sit down and make about a change in my brain.
In the wetness, I have been re-reading. I re-read Plain Jane by Eve Horowitz. Last time we talked, I talked about over-reading through my tween years (not that they were called tween years then. I think in the early nineties, we still went by the moniker Young Adult). Then in high school, I slowed down. Ninth grade I read what was assigned for ninth grade English (all two books, pathetic), the two books for ninth grade French, and two other books (Fifth Business and a non-fiction book about the Holocaust, but I can’t remember which one.)
So I was not much of a reader in high school. Or much of a writer (see my About Me page for my failed foray into high school Writer’s Craft). I wanted to be a writer, yet didn’t write much. I suppose that’s like now. I want to be a writer, and although I write an exponential amount more than in high school, I likely still don’t write enough.
I didn’t stop reading entirely. Clearly I still went to the library because in either the spring of grade twelve or the spring of OAC, I took Plain Jane out of the library (I’d like to think it was OAC, because for some reason doing things in your last year of high school makes things more meaningful than doing things during a placeholder year). I don’t remember many books in high school, but this was a book that I left right by the front door so that the minute I came rushing home from the school bus, I could pick it up to read it (I rarely took the school bus in OAC, so likely this story happened in grade twelve. Boo.). It was the first time in a long time I remember enjoying a book.
So I read it again. I can see why seventeen/eighteen year old me liked it. I still do, but there’s a lot there that I can see my teenage self not really understanding why she liked it so much. I know I’m being vague and frustrating, but I guess around going off to university time, that’s a breaking-free time, like you don’t have to be this person anymore. You can be someone else. Not that I went to university and started writing more (pretty much the opposite being a math major). Not that I even went to university and changed that much (bigger changes happened more after I moved to Halifax in 2004).
Maybe I felt like I was in high school this week. As the pudgy, quiet, geeky kid with no self-esteem in high school, these have not been the most pleasant of feelings. But I still liked the book. It was comforting to re-experience something and not have it be a disappointment.