2:00 AM: This is why you're you

A lot of my writing concerns the question of what it means to be who you are. Whether being stuck in our natural human physical forms means being stuck in a certain pattern of behaviour and identity, or whether such things are malleable.

I rambled a bit about this on my American Fiction exam essay. If I'd had time to collect my thoughts on the matter I might've said something worthwhile but as it was I pointed out a few examples, connected them in a threadbare, almost obligatory way, and summed it all up with characteristically specious generalizations. I have problems with myself, with the way my communication does not always match my intention.

Comedy is often, almost always in fact, a product of set behaviour. That's why randomness doesn't necessarily hold up, because "classic" comedy, in the vein of vaudeville and even Monty Python, is constructed around the bearing forth, and often subversion, of expected behaviour. This character acts a certain way. Once you start thinking about exceptions, you give the character nuance, which is a difficult trick to make work in comedy. Not impossible. Don't think I'd ever say something like that is impossible.

But I can't overthink it, and it's not my goal to philosophize on the nature of comedy. Not tonight anyhow (I've often found it fruitless to attempt to categorize comedy as this or that, because in all the rigidity of form there is also contradictions.)

The question was whether the body is the home of the truth: as various books in the class dealt with questions of racial and gender uncertainty. If I'd given it more thought (and by that I mean, like, two weeks' worth) I'd say that it is introduced as a source of important truth, but then subverted and devalued. Subverted in that while the truth is empirically true (Coleman Silk is black, Calliope Eugenides is physically a boy) in both cases it is proven more malleable than one would think, thus giving a level of untruth to the truth. In "The Things They Carried" (and in a more prosaic sense in "So Far From God") the very idea of a dead body is subverted, because what is death but an alteration of one's perception of a person's identity? I remember when I was at my Grandad's funeral last year and the pastor said that death didn't mean he was gone, only that our relationship to him had changed. This is pretty much the entire point of the last story in "The Things They Carried."

We're stuck as ourselves. This is what I keep coming back to. I write because of my desire to imagine lives that are not my own: that are similar, but with different opportunities and traits. Something external that can be controlled. Because I've always found the idea of living one's whole life only one way somewhat strange, in the way that you look at your fingers one day and think "I never realized how odd my knuckles are." Normal but odd.

Today was that uninteresting that that's what I've come to talk about. I worked all day. Conversed with my co-workers on the usual way, expressed the same frustrations as always. There's a lot of frustration but at the same time job satisfaction is a tricky thing. I can't imagine having a better work scenario, not at this point in my life and times. So whatever burden I'm carrying, I will. In four months, a lot of my co-workers will be gone, some of them very, very soon, or at least working fewer shifts. The idea of seeing the entire staff of the store turn over is a little scary. You get used to certain people's presence, certain routines, dynamics.

We'll see how things change.

Well, it's after 12:30. I shout probably get cooking if I'm going to do any writing tonight. Most nights lately, when I've written, I've gotten a new story out there. Tonight I feel like redrafting one, because I was have trouble with it, and then at work I was having one of my usual daydreaming sessions and a new element clicked into my head.

We'll see how it goes.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto