How precious this photo is.
This morning while forcing myself to read "The Things They Carried" for English class, it got me thinking.
I decided that I wish I knew what it was like to be in a war, to have to live that life of every moment maybe being your last, living with that faint fear in everything you do. It's such an extreme mental and physical task. I don't think I'd ever make it out alive, maybe physically if I got blessed, but definitely not mentally. And perhaps, that's why it's generally known as a man's job.
Anyways, I wanted to quote the book. Because the author Tim O'Brien wrote things that I don't want to forget.
"I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I'm still writing war stories. My daughter...tells me that it's an obsession... In a way, I guess, she's right: I should forget it. But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, as the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things done as they come to you. That's the real obsession. All those stories (33)."
"The war occurred half a life time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story (36)."
But I need to say that if hope is all there is, than enough it shall be.
"You said that You'd never leave me, You'd never forsake me, You'd never let goooo. You said you'd come to my rescue, that'd you'd be my refuge- to never lose hope. How many times can I fail You before You say You're through, that You've had enough?
As weird as unusual this day^ was, June something 2009, it was a good one in Arizona. And looking at this photo reminded me of how much I liked it. Oh. And lawl at how many people we squeezed into Becky's room that afternoon.
In my first hour this morning, video/computer art class I posted a status on Facebook that read: Thursdays feelin' like Mondays; what nonsense. And at that time I was the same kid I was yesterday, and the day before and 2.5 months before that.
