fifteen years

In fifteen years assuming I am not dead or worse subsumed into middle class America with a white picket fence and 2.5 kids, I am sure I will still be thinking about the exact same things in merely a different light. There will still be people who can't see the strange beauty and complexities behind something refuse to understand, because it is so important to maintain that train of simpler thought. I am sure I will still be finding broken people and patching them back together as best as I can. I am sure I will still sleep outside just to escape the noise of so many people that I will never know.

Blue Velvet affected me profoundly in that my ideas of right and wrong were completely turned inside out and around. I watched the "Candy Colored Clown" scene numerous times and turned the absurdity about in my mind and still wonder about how David Lynch does it. Blue Velvet was a lovely segue into Lolita another of my pet projects from this class.

Lolita disturbed and excited me. It is certainly a novel that I shan't forget and will definitely reread in order to catch all of Nabokov's nuances. On the surface of this masterpiece one certainly has to admire the incredible wordplay. Deeper one has to admire the mindplay. Kryzs and in turn Lolita taught me one vital thing about becoming a better reader and in turn a better writer, not everything is about you. Sometimes you have to separate yourself from the content in order to get a more (dare I say it) imaginative view. It isn't about the content, it's about using your imagination to delve deeper into something that can be beautiful.

The Wire was another particularly disturbing bit for me as I had a great deal of trouble separating myself from the content. I guess as one who was raped as a child might a bit of difficulty finding sympathy for our beloved Humbert, I had trouble sympathsizing with Omar until anticatharsis where I gathered up all of that baggage and instead looked at the story as it was, real, complicated and accurate. I will carry the moment where I was able to relinquish control and just slip into a story in which I had so much vested with me until I don't remember it anymore.

This class has been for lack of something less cliche, a blessing. Therapeutic and provoking, vicious and strange, but most of all the most useful English class I have ever had. Thanks guys.