Characters I Love

Memories are slippery, so I can't be sure exactly how dramatic this moment actually was, but I remember sitting, at 17, in a waiting room at Kaiser. I was there with my grandmother for some appointment or other, and I was reading War and Peace. (Isn't this how everyone spends the summer after their high school graduation?) Anyway, I had a thing for Prince Andrei. In fact, I'm looking forward to re-reading the book just so I can see how he holds up over a dozen years. And so there came a moment where another character acts in a way that will hurt him, and I exclaimed, to the whole room, "You whore!" Um, that was embarrassing.

Anyway, he's not the only character I have gotten too close to. And if you add in tv shows and movies, I am over-empathizing with characters all the time. But he's still the one that matters the most.

And now, reading Infinite Summer, I find myself (like Avery Edison) liking Hal Incandenza just a little too much. And fearing for him. Avery says anxious, and since I have such a close personal relationship with anxiety, it goes without saying that that's the best word for it. I just... I want it to be okay. But I don't think it will be.

I've always liked to root for the bad guy and tried to create antiheroes where they didn't exist. And I was down with my ex who, we joked, only liked movies where people died at the end. And yet.... A co-worker was telling me something he heard about ways in which women conceive of fairness differently than men. And really, when it comes down to it, as much as I don't want to be like everyone else, man do I crave the happy ending. I want things to be the way they are supposed to be. Which isn't always happy per se. But is the way I feel like it should be. It's unoriginal perhaps, and quite possibly is pretty unhealthy, but it's me.

All that said, I can't imagine DFW giving me what I want. And probably I'd respect him less if he did.