I'm Baaaack

Can you believe it’s been just about six months, Lebron?  Six months since I’ve reached out to you, six months in which you’ve had the chance to acclimate yourself to Miami, to your new teammates.  I’ve had an entire semester come and go, and then some.  But it’s only now, with you at the All-Star Break, and I on my first vacation since the start of the school year, that we’re both at a point of reflection. 

I know, you’re saying, what about your Christmas break?  I had to play on Christmas, man.  But if it makes you feel any better, I not only watched you play on Christmas, but I got to work myself that night writing college recommendations, and didn’t really look up from my work until sometime around Groundhog Day.  So my feeling of liberation has kind of coincided with the reappearance of my lawn from the ugly blanket of snow that choked it for six weeks.  And to tell you the truth, Lebron, if two of my classes had for some reason decided to actually hand in the essays I had assigned them, I’d have work to do over this vacation, too.  So bless them for caring enough about me to hold onto that work so I’d have some leisure time.

Enough chit-chat.  You’re probably wondering what I’m reading.  One of my colleagues recommended to me a book called The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. To show off my prowess with my new Kindle, I downloaded it while she was telling me about the book, an $11 investment in showing off just how cool I am. I think anytime someone recommends a book to you, you start to wonder about yourself, you know, which parts of you have been revealed in that person’s psychoanalysis.  I can only conclude that it’s our communication in this very blog that inspired the recommendation.

You see, the novel is written in the form of direct address between my man Balram Halwai, a devilish creature that I think a cross between Raskolnikov and Rogozhin, and Mr. Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, who is preparing to come to India to see a beautiful democracy at work.  Balram, a charming little man, turns out to be a murderer (hence the connection to my two Russian friends).  He seems to be walking the serrated edge of sanity, quite satisfied with having murdered the one upper caste person who seems to have been an ally, on the verge of some mysterious something else that can’t possibly be good for anyone, yet he is exceptionally engaging.  Maybe he’s a sociopath – it’s so tempting to diagnose people, isn’t it? – but if he is, he’s the kind we like, the kind who would impress you with his normalness before he goes off and does something to, thank goodness, somebody who isn’t you.

Anyway, I’m only 35% into the book, so I don’t want to overanalyze it, but it’s been a heap of fun over these first 36 hours of vacation.  You also might like that the character has a nickname (the title) that you could use when you tire of the royalty of your existing nickname; it was bestowed on him by a school inspector because Balram is the rarest of creatures in the world, just like the white tiger, just like Lebron (not that you're an anythingpath).

Oh, and aren't you perceptive, Lebron.  Yes, I did say 35%.  You see, this is the first book I’m reading on my Kindle.  Sure, I read Mrs. Dalloway, but that was more a work experiment to see if the highlighting and note-taking features of the Kindle were useful for school stuff.  The jury’s still out on that one.  What I find in reading on the Kindle is that I feel this pull to use its features rather than just read the book.  Part of that pressure might stem from the fact that I feel your yearning for communication all the way across these six months and this continent.  You want me to have something to say about the book, the same way that our correspondence about One Hundred Years of Solitude must have been so fulfilling for you. 

But I haven’t approached my Kindle reading the same way. First of all, when I was reading Marquez, I was kind of desperate to make a connection with him, especially since Alex Bloedel told me that Solitude can reveal another layer of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I’ll see later this semester when I read Chronicle again with my AP friends. Anyway, this desire to connect, my new leathery notebook, the freedom of summer and my desire to write in said notebook – well, there was something of a confluence there.  At one point in my current reading, when the impulse to highlight was at its strongest, I was barely conscious of this analog v. digital debate that took place in my mind within the time frame of a dream. 

One argument went like this: when you copy the words into a notebook, you are lingering in them – they cover you like the steam in a sauna; you wallow in them like a hippo in the mud, you slop at them like a pig at a trough – you revel in them the way a grade school kid revels in a bowl of half-melted chocolate ice cream.  The other attorney spoke: device-to-device communication via the laptop’s USB port facilitates analysis; you can face the language on the screen without the cumbersome work of transcription, and then you can do your analysis in half the time, and maybe you’ll read more than three books in a summer.

Through the clatter of these authoritative voices piped this one: But I don’t want to analyze. I just want to read.  So if I can stomach reading without writing, if I don’t feel the need to record my thinking every time I think a thought, I’ll just read.  But that might be like asking you to play one-on-one with D-Wade after practice without keeping score.

All right, I’m off.  I’m not sure I’m going to see you tonight because the NBA All-Star game is not exactly what I’d call must-see TV.  But I do hope you’ll give my best to Melo.  He may be going through the same kind of disequilibrium you experienced last summer, and if this blog has provided you with the comfort I know it has given you, and if you’re ready to share it, then feel free to send the link to Melo.  Have fun tonight, and just in case you have grown frustrated with your blog-checking, I’ve tweeted the post so you know I’m still speaking to you.  Peace, dawg.