writing my name in water

 

i just finished rereading michael chabon's wonder boys and i'm feeling a little off. maybe it is the fact that i've been confined to my house and mundane activities or maybe it is the fact that i don't really have much to worry about but things feel off. so far the tally is up to three and a half books since i've been home (plus countless hours of 30 rock, bones, and the x files, a trip to houston, and one grad school application down) and i keep telling myself that i have to just finish this one book and then do something different. a craft, bake, leave the house, finish my grad school applications. now i have a handy holiday excuse of christmas day to let me finish tom stoppard's arcadia to add to c.s. lewis' till we have faces, tom robbins' jitterbug perfume and the aforementioned chabon novel. as i was lying in my bubble bath finishing up the last chapter, i felt myself empathizing with the crazy grady tripp and i realized i over-empathize with literature. i go into every book as an escape and i'm not sure what i'm running from or what i'm expecting but i always expect something. i'm always looking for something and even when i don't find it, whatever it is, my mind tries to find something to latch on to with every bit of information i process. i can't just read a book or listen to a song without over-analyzing everything, underlining passages that apply to some oblique thought or occurrence. finally having someone around who understands how my mind works, someone who is around me almost constantly, i am starting to see how unreasonable my worrying and fixating can be. i'm not able to simply enjoy things unless i look at them from a dozen different angles, unless i take in every possible opinion and interpretation. i spend so much of my free time with my head in a book or listening to music but i have never really been able to do the same thing with movies. why? because i can't invest in movies the same way i can with literature and music. i can't immerse myself in movies the way i can with these other mediums so maybe i should start watching more movies - empathizing with some of these literary characters doesn't seem healthy. i'm not finding what i'm looking for, so should i keep looking? i can't give up books or music, but maybe a different approach is in order. books straddle the realm of transience and permanence - a fleeting escape, one that you can come back to again and again. maybe i can't keep looking for an escape.