Now let’s focus on quality.
I want to create. I want to create good things. I can’t
create good things if I don’t create anything.
Did you ever do syllogisms? Those overlapping circles,
seeing which people or subjects share which characteristics? Interesting. Here
the entire circle of creating good things would exist within the circle of
creating anything.
I also loved logic problems. Solving them, yes, was very
satisfying – finding, for example, that Mr. Johnson lived in the blue house
with two windows and played the trombone and owned a dog and that Miss Anderson
lived in the yellow house with three floors and played the flute and owned no
pets. Everything in its place. Beyond the matching, though, I also loved the
tiny little universes contained in each. The soap operas created when Mr.
Johnson fell in love with Miss Anderson and wanted to marry her, but discovered
that she was allergic to animals and that his beloved husky, Rupert, would have
to go were they to live their happily ever after together. The questions of how
Miss Anderson ended up with a three-story house when she was unemployed. Was
she really allergic to dogs, or was she just jealous that Rupert had been a
gift to Mr. Johnson from his first wife, and therefore decided he must go? I
loved these facts, and the potential stories
Remember in elementary school or so when you and your
friends would play games to decide your future? HOMES was one of them, I think.
What did that stand for? House. Mansion. Shack. What were O and E? Office?
Elementary school? Anyway, it was a series of categories that would tell you
where you would live, how many kids you would have, what your job would be, and
of course, who you would marry. There was nothing like that certainty of seeing
all the other options get crossed off one by one by a steadily counting and
confident friend wielding a rainbow-erasered pencil of fate. Now your fate
would be decided. That is, unless you ended up sitting with a different boy on
one of the red benches at the lunch table. Sure, you could argue that it was
just a mix-up in the lunch line that forced you into this rearrangement – after
all, your best friend Courtney was sitting next to you on the other side, far across
the between-bench abyss and sharing an orange bench with Cathy from mathy. But
really, that’s how fate works.
Ahem.
Can I tell you something?
I have a lot of goals here. Some of them relate to quality.
Quantity certainly helps, though. That’s why I brought coffee with me.
