Renaldo

I remembered what it was I wanted to say but forgot about yesterday. Hooray! It goes like this:

So I talk to myself sometimes. (This is what I've never told anybody.) And by sometimes, I mean all the time. But I don't actually use my voice--I whisper to myself. Because I'm a quiet person, and it might disturb my parents just how often I talk to myself. So I do a lot of whispering. To myself.

I was whispering to myself, making a comment on a comic I had just read. I don't remember the sentence exactly, but it involved the word 'love.' As I whispered it to myself, though, a tiny little devil managed to make it's way up my throat. When I got to the word 'love,' it came out in the form of a burp. I ended up using the Devil's Tongue to speak that single word.

It was the creepiest thing you have no idea.

All like "Gah, doesn't he realize that's not LOVEBUWAAAAHHHREDUM that he is feeling?"

(Freaked me out.)

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher recommended four books to me. Of these four books, three have become movies. I wish I could remember the name of the book that didn't make it, because it had quite an impact on me, but whatever. The books to movies were Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, Bridge to Terabithea, and Tuck Everlasting. Each book was pretty great in it's own way, but the last two were really understated and didn't have a huge following the way Lemony Snicket's did. I was never all that fond of Terabithea, because the characters were represented as more of hick farmers in the book, and I couldn't relate to that. But Tuck Everlasting left quite a (heh) lasting impression on me.

I suppose you could say I became a fangirl, back before I knew what a fangirl was. When I wasn't busy keeping up with Snicket, I would often reroll the storyline around in my head. There were a lot of elements that really appealed to me; disjointed memories, being shut in, being shut out, horses. The book managed to explore being the one left behind, as well as being the one leaving. Which was a big deal to 4th-grade Kelly, who had just moved, and whose friends were always moving away.

And when the movie came out, you better beleive I raised a rukus about it. I didn't want to see the movie, I needed to. And that movie, oh fuck did it suck. It was horrible. It was as if they took everything from the book that mattered, and then shot it. But it's Tuck Everlasting, so it doesn't die, it just gets really awkward and stupid. The movie was greusome in the way it destroyed itself, it was like watching your parents commit a murder-suicide. It should have been rated X for extreme graphic decay of your youth and imagination.

So yeah, little Kelly was crushed.

The first book I read after seeing that movie, I read twelve times. I didn't like the book, there was nothing all that great about it, but I read it twelve times. It was my duty to read that book to death. When I finished it, I would go right back to page one. The schoolyear ended and I had to give the book back. So instead I would write a story that had no real direction or even plot. I lost the first story I was working on, and started another. Kelly would later exhibit this strange reptitive-obsessive behavior when researching walruses.

So I mark the day I saw that movie as the day I started experiencing serious depression. Because really, it all went downhill from there.