Anyway, to ensure that I do in fact receive the package -- as I didn't yesterday because I forgot to tell Cingular my apartment number and then they gave DHL the wrong phone number to contact me...the freaking phone company forgot my phone number! -- I am spending my between-classes time here instead of on campus. (Yes, I'm aware that sentence was nearly impossible to disentangle. God, I love punctuation.) Normally, I would camp out on the third floor of Waterfield and read copious amounts of Spanish literature. But no. I tried to tell myself I would do my homework here. Of course not. I'm shopping on iTunes and looking at exciting, new production pictures for Order of the Phoenix.
And blogging.
And now, a random thought on life and literature:
Plot. The representation in fiction of a character's efforts to achieve a purpose in the face of obstacles, concluding with his decisive success or failure.
-- Theme and Form, 1964
In creative writing classes, we talk about the differences between character-driven and circumstance-driven plots. The circumstance-driven one is like an action movie where what happens to the characters determine how things end up. The character-driven one is a story that is moved along, complicated, and resolved because choices that the protagnist makes. It's the difference in an external locus of control verus an internal one. So of course, the character-driven plots make for better, more meaningful stories. They are significant.
So yeah, this applies to life, right? You can float through life like a piece of crap and just let things happen to you, or you can make decisions. I just realized the other day that letting life come to you (er, me) is basically living a circumstance-driven plot. It's a crappy story. Anyway, the moral of this story is that I'd much rather live a character-driven plot. Even if it means making some bad decisions here and there, of which I am scared to death. If nothing else, it makes for a better story, eh?
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