Skip to main content

Misunderstanding

I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.

These words uttered by Augustus Waters in John Green's The Fault in Our Stars have been hugely misunderstood by me. I guess I've always regarded them as... as a positive thing - the notion of going up brings ideas of going up in the world and that sort of thing but now I see it differently.

What fun would a roller coaster be if it only went up? As well as being entirely dysfunctional, kind of bad and rubbishly impossible it would be... suspenseful. It would be a way of living filled with dissatisfaction and waiting and would just be so... hopeless.

I don't know why but it's just changed for me tonight, I've seen it in a completely different way; life can sometimes be like this stupidly suspenseful, waiting-around, false-hope filled thing and it's only when you realise that the suspense isn't going to lead to anything, the waiting around won't either and the hope is entirely, one-hundred percent worthless - it is only then that you realise that the roller coaster is going up and only up. It's a pointless path to take and, then we ask, why take it? But sometimes, just sometimes we like to believe that the drop is coming.

Sometimes we ignore the falsehoods and the truth of things because sometimes things are worth ignoring falsehoods for. My roller coaster may only be going up but someday, one day, it'll find it's way down and then, my friend, it will be incredible.

Comments

  1. Wow I've never thought about that quote that way - but I totes agree - what good is a rollercoaster that only goes up? There's no fun in that!

    Great blog post :) loved it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Teens don't read"

Earlier today Maureen Johnson pointed out that the view of "teens don't read" in the UK is deeply entrenched (which is a word that I now love  and had never heard before). As a teenager in the UK, the stigma around reading seems to be - to me - it's "uncool", it's "geeky", there "aren't any good books out there". I think the fact that a lot of teenagers in British schools are exposed to older literature or, perhaps, not that popular literature in lessons and forced into over-analysing and spending countless hours on 'what the author meant'. A point that was raised in this twitter discussion was that people didn't want to be seen reading, or didn't want to be seen reading certain books. It's made me realise that I never   ever ever  see people reading in the older years in my school ( ever ). Perhaps the odd year 7 (12 year old) or year 8 (13 year old) will read, but - from experience - they will probably be ...

The people I have met through ink

I read somewhere once that one of the reasons books are so great is that one can pick them up a second time and feel how you did, or remember where you were the first time you picked it up and opened it. I stand by this idea as to one of the reasons I love reading so much. I am perusing the wonderful words of Ali Smith's The Accidental for my level 1 module 'Introduction to Narrative' and whilst this module is all very technical (and trust me, I do love that!) I am really enjoying reading a novel where the characterisation leaves a bitter sweet taste in my mouth and when I close my eyes all I can see is Amber; how she looks, how she dresses, how she smells... I love that. I love that I can read 200 pages or so of one novel and suddenly there is this person inside of my head and I can't get her out. Not so long ago I read R. J. Anderson's Nomad (the second in the Swift series) and I was brought back to why I adore fantasy so much. I felt like I wanted to fly, and...

Ask FML

Ask FM infuriates me. I'm not going to take a moral high-ground and say I've never asked a question on it, because that would be lying but it still makes me angry. (Note that you can in fact dislike something that you have partaken in previously...) I can understand the appeal to both asking and answering questions - yeah, it can get some good conversation going. What I don't understand is that those two people could have that perfectly civilised conversation about all those deep and meaningful questions without the anonymity. Furthermore, why does someone immediately think "oh, I'm bored I KNOW let's post a link to ask.fm on my facebook/twitter page"? If you're bored go and do talk to people (text, phone, family, skype DO IT), read a book, make a video, write a blog post. Why ask people ask you questions? I just... I guess I don't get it. I have seen people horrendously bullied on formspring and ask fm and yet they continue to allow themselv...