lacuna lorelei
During the football game we saw an advertisement for 40 Days and 40 Nights, in which the protagonist attempts the supposedly arduous feat of going without sex during Lent. All of us alienated grad students found this very funny. Forty days? What a lightweight.
Somehow, this is exactly what I expected Susan Minot to look like.
In elementary school phys-ed class I'm afraid I was a type: tortoiseshell glasses, picked last for teams, you know. It wasn't the physical exertion I minded—I could run, and so on—but the psychological pressure of team sports. If the ball (any sort of ball) got near me, I'd fuck it up somehow and incur the wrath of my teammates, so generally I tried to stand in an unused corner of the field and outwait the game. Now and then an enlightened teacher would let me be scorekeeper. This was brilliant because I was suddenly unaffiliated. It was now a matter of neutrally observing the game, tracking its progress, noting which situations led to scores and which didn't. It was a matter of analytically extracting generalities from specific instances and attaining the sort of comprehension that the people playing the game would never have: they were in the thick of it, their viewpoint was wrong. But I, non-participant, was outside its scope.
I am starting to suspect that the choice of writing as a vocation has placed me in a similar position with respect to life in general.
