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Journal Entry September
7, 2003 Have you ever done or said something that you wondered afterward, why the heck did I do/say that? Well, that happened to me today. I stood up in church today and said that I was grateful to live in the town that I live in. I hate this town. I’d rather live on the moon, counting the holes in the craters than live here. So, why the heck did I say that? Learning about deconstruction in my American Novel class has opened a floodgate of theories for me and so, when this occurred, I began thinking. One element of deconstruction states that, whenever you do things that does not feel “normal” to you, you are really, in actuality, closer to yourself. The whole theory of deconstruction deals with the idea of re-reading, stating that we cannot truly appreciate a story until we’ve read it twice, since the first reading is simply an interpretation using the experiences that we’re already familiar with, and it is not until the second reading that we are faced with the unfamiliar. So, you could, in theory, apply this to your own life, especially when you think about how we will often judge a person without really knowing them, only to reverse our opinions when we get to know them. But the bigger question is, are the actions and decisions we do and make in our lives judged mainly on the fact that they’re comfortable to us? But, could this be somehow related to spontaneity? That was the question that occurred today. On the way home, I was reminded that many of the major decisions were made “on the spur of the moment” (while, I spend hours worrying about minor decisions. Perhaps this is a lesson for me). However, I cannot say that any of these decisions were to my detriment. In fact, I can only think of positive things that have come about as a result of these spontaneous decisions. But, that, at least to me, seems more like a contradictory idea to deconstruction rather than a complementary one. So, how can they relate? Well, to be honest, I don’t know yet. It’s something that I’m going to give some thought to simply because I obviously have no life. One thought that I just had about ten minutes ago, I believe, goes something like this: I remembered when I was growing up that to be spontaneous was a positive attribute so I, from the time that I was a child, tried to cultivate that attribute. Why is that, and what is it that makes a person spontaneous? I don’t know. Deconstruction argues that we don’t re-read books because we like to live in the comfortable and not the unknown. Perhaps those who are spontaneous have already somehow made peace with living in the unknown. Yet, I can remember hearing several people, when I was growing up, wishing they could be more like so-and-so because they were so spontaneous, and they felt that they could never be that way. Hmm..I’ll have to give it more thought since, well, because I’m bored with the idea now and would rather eat. But I’ll give it the name “The Deconstruction/Spontaneity Relationship” and return to it…whenever a new thought comes spontaneously to me. A CD/mp3 update…although I still have yet to make peace with the torture device, I did find one useful thing. Having 167 songs on one CD is great for driving in the car since I can just set the thing on the seat and let it play. This means, no more lugging fifteen hundred CDs to and from the car and nearly having a wreck trying to first, find the CD that I want to listen to (which is always the last one. I thought I would be smart one day and start at the last one only to discover that the CD I wanted was the first one) and then trying to switch the CDs. I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I can shake hands with the thing in peace, but it’s a start. © EXCEL
What do you want to do?
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