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| January 24, 2002 | ||
FEAR THE COW!! |
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There is
this thing that has stuck with me since middle school- a terrible,
pathetic thing,
a thing of unremitting torment. It attacks me when I'm feeling vulnerable
and self-conscious. And, worst of all, it's- it's a metaphor. |
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I'm
being haunted by a metaphor. I caught it off of an awful book we
had to read about stupid, self
absorbed teenagers. (not as awful in retrospect as "Lord of the
Flies", but at the time lacking the comparison, I wouldn't have
been able to say "well, at least they didn't eat each other" in
my summation of how terrible the book was.) |
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You know, those are about the only two books I can remember disliking with a fiery passion while I was reading them- I can remember books that I thought were dull beyond belief as I slouched through them ("Grapes of Wrath"), books I deplored of because of heavy-handed symbolism or overly lush descriptive passages, but for required reading that rubbed me wrong every time, there are very few other stand outs... "A Thousand Acres," say, or "The Outsiders." Obviously, I have a problem with "true-to-life-dramatic-realism" books. I can't take drama without mitigation by the absurd or the fantastic- can't say as I'm terribly surprised, seeing how that applies my movie preferences. As a child I hated reading books that weren't about ghosts or children with telekinetic powers or both. |
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One of the nicest things about not being in school anymore is that you don't have to read the books you don't want to read. |
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Anyway,
with all the suspense I've built up I might as well tell you what
the book was- "Pigman" by Paul Zindel (and there was
a sequel!) |
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| Hell,
it probably is a good book, as are, no doubt, all the other
books I mentioned, and I suppose if my complaint is that they
aren't "The
Three Musketeers" I get what I deserve. But that's really
here nor there- the thing is, I didn't like the book, and still
it stuck with me for ten years. And probably will, just like
the Outsiders left me with little more than a vague dread of
living
in a world where everything tasted like baloney. (And I can't
think of the Outsiders without thinking of All Creatures Great
and Small (Ah, Siegfried!, Ah, Tristan!) and Shane, which I
remember nothing of, except that I had to read them all in succession) |
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What The Pigman left me with is an image of roller-skating indoors in fancy dress and THE METAPHOR. |
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Ok,
so here it is; when the protagonists John and Lorraine meet on
the school bus; she's seated, he (very handsome) sits beside her,
she
drops something, and frets because she thinks that he'd see her
picking it up as "a cow, bending over." Now, literal-minded
as I tend to be, started out picturing this all wrong. I wondered
what a cow, seated on a school bus, would look like bending over
in an attempt to retrieve an object from the floor. |
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Or a girl,
who from straight on looks normal, but from the side has a distinctly
bovine appearance. |
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And
that metaphor has stayed lodged in my memory, and appears every
time I
have to pick something off of the floor in public, and largely explains
why I often go about with my shoelaces untied. Can you imagine how
much happier I could be without the phrase "a cow, bending over" stuck
in my head? I blame all of my self-consciousness on Lorraine. I
learned it from her, the bitch. I never was one to wonder what I
looked like,
bending over. Or what animal I looked like, bending over. I probably
never gave it a moment's thought until she came along. But now I
think about cows every time my pen falls off of my desk. |
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It's
not all that terrible. On good days, it makes me laugh. (A cow!
on a bus! bending over!) On bad days, though it's just sad. I'm
so much more comfortable with myself than I was in high school
and even than I was in college (and all it took was a change in
high
schools, a summer in Philadelphia, two trips to Russia, two different
colleges, and some serious identity questioning…) but I'll
never shake the cow. The cow will always be there. Waiting for me. |
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| Sigh. | ||
| cos all these conversations wind... on and on, on and on, on and on... | ||
