Flashing back

I was always a bit of an odd kid. Not always easy to get along with, but generally easy-going. A bit of a black sheep in my family... I've always been the book worm. As a teen, I was in love with Grisham novels and Archie comics. I've been a bit of an academic (I use that term loosely... it's not so much that I'm ambitious... I've just always had a relatively easy time with school). I don't watch college football or basketball (or, not often), and I was never a stellar athlete (I'm probably better at everything now than I ever was in high school). I'm a big fan of really cheesy jokes and controversial books. My mom always said (and still says) that I am a weird duck, and has commented a number of times on my reading of some "weird shit". I've tried to convince her that the books I read are pretty fantastic, but she's a bit of a hard sell. I was always the kid in the family challenging political views, religious views, personal views, etc. I wasn't always very good at keeping my mouth shut when circumstances dictated that this was the right thing to do. But I also felt more comfortable at the adult table during holiday dinners than I ever did at the kid table... I knew that I simply wasn't that cool, and to a certain extent, often felt uncomfortable with most people my own age. I followed around my big brother like a shadow for years. Even in high school, I would hang out with him and his friends from time to time... but I always tried to make sure I established myself as independent, even though that wasn't so true. Now that I've hit my quarter-life crisis mark, this is less often the case. Still, I always felt like I was older than a lot of people... not so much with the way I acted (I could be as immature as a character from an Adam Sandler movie), but I always just felt like I got on better with people older than me. Simply a feeling of uncertainty, awkwardness, a sense that I was out of place. Like on the Sesame Street song. That must be why I snagged K (she's a cradle-robber... two whole years older than me).

I was also the one who left Canada to backpack to Europe and who moved away to BC and never went back to the prairies. I also got married before finishing school, which caused a lot of anxiety with the parents... between my trip to Europe and getting hitched, they were really worried that something would happen and I wouldn't finish school). Although my career path has been anything but extraordinary, English lit was definitely not the plan when I went to started my first year of post-secondary. Neuroscience was the plan. Or, at least Bio-chem or general sciences. I loved chemistry even through my first year of uni. But I loved my other classes more... Philosophy, Religious Studies, Canadian Literature. It was in these classes that I found my passion. Classes where I could contemplate, argue, challenge my classmates, get riled up, have the foundation of my own beliefs challenged. This drove me. And still does. An example being: I'm one of the few people I know who would actually be interested in reading about Margaret Atwood's take on writing and being a writer. Like mom said... "weird shit".

I guess after reading L.G.'s blog today, I felt a touch nostalgic. I also got a message from my Europe travel-companion yesterday that had a clip from Anthony Bourdain's travels in Belfast, a city that both J and I really enjoyed. This, along with the perpetual question of, "What was I like as a kid?", makes me wonder how the world sees me. What I was like from the outside looking in?

Although I know Atwood was talking specifically about a writer being both a "person" and an "author" simultaneously... but maybe part of the sensation is related to what she talks about in her book, Negotiating with the Dead... ourselves as we live, and ourselves as we are seen... maybe even ourselves as how we remember ourselves. If that makes you dizzy... well... that's the point, I guess...

"Where does it come from, this notion that the writing self -- the self that comes to be thought of as "the author" -- is not the same as the one who does the living? Where do writers pick up the idea that they have an alien of some sort living in their brain? Surely it wasn't Charles Dickens the fun-loving paterfamilias, keen deviser of Christmas games for his kiddies, who caused poor Little Nell to die an early death? He cried the whole time his pen-wielding hand was pitilessly doing her in. No, it was the necrophiliac he carried around inside him, like a tapeworm made of ink"

T