Come meet me!

My name is visible in the post already, so I won’t start there. I’ll start instead with an overview of what’s beyond the name: the sophomore who looks for cats to vacuum any time she needs to write an essay, but is paradoxically studying English anyways because she wants to be a published author. I worry about her sometimes. She’s a little dense, so reality might not set in until she uses those rejection notices to light the campfire in her trailer park. If they allow fires.

As her father remarked recently, “[she] goes through books the way we eat chips.” `Tis a hunger we all share here, and I mention it only because her fodder was devoid of classics (gasp!). She ate other things. Redwall. Inkheart. High School classics like Call of the Wild, White Fang and To Kill a Mockingbird. If you ask her to define Renaissance literature – or even the era – she has to think a little. She’s the fast food junkie discovering salad bars: a little unsure in how to assemble the thing, but conscious that carrots and sprouts will be a step up from her potato chips.

Her own renaissance is barely sprouting. Like I said, she’s a junkie. She likes to feel the wind on her face from thumbing through a thousand-page book. Email her an ebook and she pokes it like it might bite. Like I also said, though: she's hungry. As she learns to navigate and participate in a digital sphere, I imagine she will also develop the dreadful habit of playing with her food. After all, she reads in order to write.