I Capture the Castle

I saw the title movie recently and really liked it, although it ended so bittersweetly. Unfortunately, that's life. Altogether, I felt the main character Cassandra was alot like me.. even though I would've picked Henry Cavill/Stephen ANYFRIGGINGDAY over the other guy... but whatevs. lol. The title is so dreeeeamy that I can't get over it! I'll have to read the book, too. :)

All-State's coming up in like, a week.. oh geez, maybe less. It's scary because I always think I have it together, but I really don't. I have so much to practice. :( Sigh. I really hope I do better than I have in previous years. I always try to be proud of myself, and I am most of the time--but I'm a perfectionist. It's a great and terrible thing to be.



But this week in general has been pretty good. Thanksgiving was good, despite the chaos of having mom cook EVERYTHING for the first time in a long time, with Grandma still recovering from her broken hip and that kind of changing everything. But we got around it, and I don't wanna sound like it's her fault, 'cause it's not.

This past month or so in general has been bad, really bad. Just a lot of things happening all at once. My dad had gallbladder surgery after a horrible attack, and that made things better for a while, but recently he had another horrible attack and had to get his appendix out. The ER is never helpful either, as my mom didn't get home 'til 2AM on a school night after hours and hours of waiting. Thankfully he's much better now, but all of this merely happened while other horrible events occurred.. my Uncle that I never met, dying alone and under strange circumstances, and my grandma passing away after struggling for months on end. And not to mention my paternal grandmother's hip and memory issue. It's going pretty fast. I'm scared wondering if she'll remember me much longer.




It's a strange thing watching all your heroes die with time. And I don't just mean family; I mean famous people that somehow become part of who you are---people that seem like they could never die, like Paul McCartney, or Eddie Vedder, Neil Young, or Bob Dylan. And yet, they're people and they are willed to die. We think they're not human. We hope they're not human.

I can't imagine what it was like for my parents to watch their parent(s) pass away. For me, it was someone I barely knew, but to them--it was what they are to me. I can't fathom that day, what it would be like. I don't want to know.


As I was reading Letters to a Young Poet today, it struck me really deeply, and soundly, how much those words were alive. Commonly, we read words like dead things, things that, once passed over, never revive. And when we analyze literature, it's all wrong. We're taught to speed read, to, as quickly as possible, sum up an idea, get the gist, get it over with, and feel smarter. And that's all wrong. Take minutes to read a page, to read a paragraph, a sentence, two words. Because those words are someone else, and now are in you, and you must respect them as if they were rich possessions generously offere to you from another dimension, another time.

Too frequently we read in the dark, with cluttered noise all around. It wasn't 'til today, reading in the utmost silence and daylight, that I realized it.