it clearly isn't

If anyone can point me to the direction where I can find a copy of The Tower of Misunderstanding by Dino Ignacio, please do so.


I wrote the following paragraph a long time ago, back in the days after college graduation and before I was actually employed (which, if you're paying attention, was a pretty big gap). It was fiction, but reading it now, it could be otherwise. Ripped from Alex Garland's The Beach, this was supposed to be the introduction to a story.

My name doesn't matter. Where I live, what I do-- these are not important. Details do little more than limit who you are, and the last thing people need is more limitations.

I tell myself I will leave a mark in this world. I will like the people around me, I will be the person I'm expected to be, and I will succeed in all the things I do.

>

I tell myself I am not lying when I tell you this.

Like most my impetuous drivel, I am tempted to write the rest of it.



I write driven by a line, a moment. In one of the Buffy DVDs, the writers discuss how they are encouraged to write towards a moment, but they can never force that moment into the story. I can build whole stories based on one line, one thing I want the characters to say. Yes, often the line has been stolen from someone else (a movie, a book, a song, a poem. something a friend once said), but that's how I write.

You can't call me original.

Right now I'm writing this while listening to Snow Patrol, ignoring my officemates, pretending this is very important.

It clearly isn't.



Realistic views of human nature cannot be rigid, dogmatic or legalistic. They have to provide for human fragility, complexity and ambiguity.
- Denise Lardner Carmody


Sigh. Sometimes you're the tarsier, sometimes you're the snake.