Turning the page: spring

I woke up to the sound of the lawnmower. Better than my alarm I suppose, which sounds exactly like a fire alarm, and has me jumping out of bed in less than two seconds.

For some reason, I'm never thrilled about the sounds of spring, Maybe it's the pollen, but I get this underlying feeling of boredom and frustration.

Winter was so quiet and cold, and everybody tried to conserve their energy by not doing or saying anything. I compensated by pretending it was spring and finding ways to enjoy such a dark season. In spring, I don't really need to do anything to make the world louder or more colorful. There's more commotion: cars are louder, people talk more, mowing of the lawn, moving around. I guess in Hawaii, this is pretty much a year round thing. So my strange feelings might have more to with the anticipation of finishing a long academic year and nearing summer.

I read these three good young-adult fiction books that my American friend lent me: "An Abundance of Katherines," "Looking for Alaska," and "Absolutely Normal Chaos." I remembered, at 12 years old, lying on a futon in my family's house in Manoa Valley, reading a book while eating a plum. I loved to eat fruit every time I read. Now that I think of it, even in college, my dad would often bring me a platter of fruit while I studied. Yummy. Anyway, if someone in the university saw me reading young-adult fiction, especially a book whose main character is 13, I'd get strange looks. It reminds me of turning 8. All my friends were reading novels, and I still wanted to read picture books, but I stopped borrowing picture books from the library because I was embarrassed.

Poor young me! How could my thinking be so off base? I'm an aspiring documentarian -- what better preparation for visual narrative than pictures books? And as for young adult fiction: I love how simple it is to describe a range of human experiences, from friendship to internal problems to family to love to realizations to loss to death. Also, I think my maturity and tolerance level can at times be quite teenish... In detective fiction and post-colonial literature classes, I was constantly analyzing while reading. Looking for symbolism, as well as gender, ethnicity and class matters. Analyzing, critiquing, questioning. The stories were not read as stories, but as windows into a different time and context.

When I began reading "An Abundance of Katherines," it took a while for me to stop analyzing and thinking, and just enjoy (as my Israeli Cinema professor told us: "You're not supposed to be entertained by these movies. Think of them as homework assignments. You need to be actively participating." Sometimes, when the workload gets to worky, pleasure can come from passivity or openness to a story.

(Uh oh, I just saw a Facebook post that a friend posted: "The Six Enemies of Greatness (And Happiness)," which are: Availability, Ignorance, Committees, Comfort, Momentum and Passivity.)