Yeah, the expansion pack did get better. I’ll eventually kill Baal and it will all be over. Lame. I’m doing anything to avoid practicing my speech. I’ve been leaving random music messages on Josh (Stranger)’s machine. I was going to reenact a scene from Waiting for Godot, but I thought I’d start cracking up. My mom called me, I helped her with this big paper. It was an okay paper. Then she called me and made me do my speech. I wrote it out and everything, now I need to make an outline.

My speech:

Hi, my name is Arthur. I bring my book bag up here because for as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to read. When I was a boy, my mom wouldn’t allow me to watch TV. Of course, I protested. “When I have kids, I’m going to let them watch TV all day long!” I would shout. But now I know why she did that. I don’t have many memories from my childhood, but one thing I do remember is my mom reading to me. And that I’ve always loved books. I know it sounds like library propaganda, but I learned that books could take you places that you could never get through a TV screen. My absolute favorite book that I would have my mom read to me was called “Puss in Boots” [take out book]. She must have read this to me hundreds of times, and even now I sometimes pull it out and look at it. After my childhood books, I didn’t read anything too interesting until high school. I was in the market for new ideas, so I asked one of my English teachers what I she would recommend. She asked me what my favorite movie was, and I said Gattaca. “Well then you have to read Brave New World,” she said. It instantly was my favorite, and it opened up a whole avenue of ideas for me. In some ways, this is the cornerstone of the person I am. If I would never have read this, I would be a completely different person. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do watch TV—everbody does. But I’ve always seen the difference between mindless entertainment and intellectual entertainment. I’ve read books that sometimes it’s taken me years to get through, but when I finally finish them, I have this great feeling—this “Wow, I know something that I didn’t know before.” So of course, after reading Brave New World (which was on banned book lists for years, I started reading things that were a little more—strange. I saw the movie version of this novel at about 3 a.m. on the Independent Film Channel, and it immediately captivated me. It was the antithesis of anything I’d ever read before. The characters were shallow, lacked motivation, and the whole plot was fixated on sex and death. Not any kind of death, but death in car crashes. I loved it, of course. But when you boiled down all the sex and death, the philosophy behind it was that human beings are machines in the same way that their cars were. I read a lot more about this, but the most fun read of any of these was Invisible Monsters, by Chuck P. I just loved the narration, it was flippant and MTV, all centered on the philosophical argument that the only way to accomplish anything meaningful was to make the wrong decisions. One of the characters got a sex change, not because he wanted to be a woman, but just because he thought that was the biggest mistake he could ever make. Last year, my journey through literature was centered on the French absurdist and existentialist movement. I read Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger, and was just blown away. The plot of The Stranger (if you haven’t read it) is about a man who lives in North Africa who quite inexplicably shoots an Arab. The only reason that one can find is that the sun made him do it. I really identified with the idea that the universe is inexplicable, and I started reading the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, one of Camus’ friends. He wrote my current favorite novel, Nausea. Nausea is about a man who is just disgusted by his own existence. It’s a really fascinating read. I know that this isn’t the end of my literary journey by a long shot. I know a lot of people who regard reading on about the same level as a visit to the dentist, but there’s one great difference. When’s the last time you saw a TV show and said to yourself “Wow, I’ve never had that thought before!”