A lot of my life is (or will be) about having my words paint pictures into other people's lives.
These couple of entries are a sort of reversal; other people's words and what they say about me.
***
In French class we were discussing "Les 400 Coups", this one defining film of La Nouvelle Vague (New Wave in French cinema). The film is about this young boy and his oppositional relationship with his parents, and society in general. Institutional measures fail to redeem him; he continues to "faire les 400 coups", or "be up to no good".
I suggested that despite this oppositional relationship, both the boy and the adults around him desired similar things (freedom, control, autonomy, respect) - as such both parties were suspect of being up to no good.
The professor was sort of taken aback, and said she had never heard this interpretation before. And going off my interpretation, there would be a whole new level to the movie (to be discussed next Monday).
I was surprised that she was surprised, being that I take the originality of my intuitive statements with a grain of salt. (Someone somewhere must have thought what I thought, sometime!)
In reflection, this synthesis-recognition reminds me of English AP. And how I often had my hand raised (Mr. Tamel dedicated a whole paragraph to how I raise my hand in the recommendation letter he wrote me), excited that I had another interpretation to contribute. And pretty much the whole class hated me.
Maybe I should have been an English major like I originally planned, so I could be surrounded by hand-raisers-who-were-hated in their respective high schools. Perhaps I would have turned out to be even more self-mocking.
I sometimes wonder about my major, despite knowing why I chose it (it afforded me the greatest freedom to dabble). Part of me growing up is learning/trying to avoid the mistakes my parents made. My father would have been happier (well, more at ease) if he had been some kind of humanities academic, as opposed to some dime-a-dozen engineer. He's convinced himself that his company values him over everyone else, but that's really nothing compared to what he could have been.
Well, I'm not going to fall into the same hole. I might not have gone to the perfect-fit college and chosen the perfect-fit major, but I have learned most (time constraints) of what I wanted to from college, and found expression in so many forms.
And there's this budding feeling that I am making the most of my time here. That I have come to love ideas so much so that I can't help but be intellectual. And I am so glad, because all of this means that when it comes time to graduate, I'll be ready.