Big Minds, Big Words

Last night one of my favorite cousins gave me access to the inner-workings of his 15-year-old daughter's mind, by way of an assignment for her English class. One of the things she wrote was ...

I get lost in worlds I only know from pieces of paper bound together.

How good is that?

On the other side of the coin, the novel I'm reading just described a 30ish-year-old man's internal rationalizations about an extra-curricular Gaydar hookup he was about to have at his out-of-town lover's flat (which he's just moved into) ....

First of all, there was the matter of habit: some people were addicted to eBay, and maybe Julius was addicted, similarly, to this -- drawn, just like the bidders who purchased jelly jars from Alaska or Oriental rugs till they were thick on the ground, by the lure of possibility, the sense, each time, that the undiscovered held the Answer, that this mate, this flank, this heaving torso, this rough jaw might prove the long-sought panacea. How could anyone, how could Julius, be expected to relinquish all this, all these, for a single known trajectory, however fond he was of the curls at David's nape or the line of his buttocks however thrilling their intimate life might be? Could one not be Pierre and Natasha at the same time?

Yup, that's a War and Peace reference and I believe this is what the author's husband labelled "hysterical realism."

Am I so wrong to prefer the straightforward musings of a teenage girl?