choose your own adventure

Circa 4th grade I dove headlong into the Choose Your Own Adventure book series -- looking back, I suspect the Titanic installment of either initiating or fueling the Titanic obsession that carried me into middle school.  You might be right in diagnosing this obsession as incredibly morbid, and you might also be worried about a 10-year-old gleaning most of her historical facts from Choose Your Own Adventure novels.  Be comforted, please, by my complete awareness that these books were also, overall, not the best writing, and the fact that I read all accessible nonfiction accounts of all my morbid historical interests.

What captivated me about this series was the way it magically bestowed agency upon me as a reader.  These books consumed much more of my time (until Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) and my mental capacity, as I meticulously and mathematically calculated every possible storyline, and how many different storylines were contained in each separate installment.  I probably read every page several times: the first time through, I'd seriously consider each decision within my personal moral-logical framework.  I'd read through at least once more, depending on how interesting that particular story was, making different illogical or immoral choices (things were much more black-and-white back then).  And finally I'd read the whole thing cover to cover, even though it was disjointed and out of order.  I just marveled over the way the whole thing fit together, its intricate construction, and the way these words were set in print but still so explicitly subject to change.

I hadn't thought of this series in years, until today.  It's been playing over and over in my head all afternoon, and then I remembered something Marija told our senior seminar that I swore I would not forget: "It's up to you to take initiative, say hi, meet people, be friendly, invite someone out for lunch or coffee."  It's up to me.

Since sophomore year when I first started really being intentional about my attitude, I've settled into a much healthier and more realistic balance: I can't hold myself responsible for everything that happens to me, but to an extent I am accountable for how I respond to these things, and to an extent I fit into a system that moves of its own accord, that responds to itself and to everything I do.  Complex.  And thanks to the 10+ years since I devoured Choose Your Own Adventure novels, my moral-logical framework has smudged into a meteorological phenomenon somewhat resembling a cumulonimbus.

Mostly I don't think about it as I go about my daily business.  Separation of philosophy and life, baby.  (Like church and state, I'm not entirely sure how possible this is -- like anything, really.  But philosophy, in my experience, too often induces paralysis.)

And here I am, getting caught up in it.  I'll have you know this is all far more complicated than I'm trying to make it here.  If you only knew how many anthropological concepts  I resisted explaining on the basis of length and irrelevance!

What I'm really thinking about right now is throwing caution to the wind, concocting wildly improbable ways to celebrate my birthday, asking my coffeeshop crush for the scoop around Wilmo, teaching my grandfather how to dictate and send emails from his iPad, finally getting comfortable enough to break the safety net of routine I set up for myself in this place.

I'm going to leave you with a somewhat related, and very cheesy-profound, exchange from the movie The Perfect Score, just because it struck me.  You can figure out how it relates.

Roy: "A lot of people think these questions are difficult."
D: "Not you?"
Roy: "Nah... These questions all have answers."