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Monday, February 11, 2013

Bathroom Monologue: What Is Your Reason For Going Back In Time?


“I’m a teacher, and a strict one, because I know what they say about kids is largely bullshit. I grew up very ambitious, very smart, top of my class because I worked hard. I didn’t lead the debate team, but I remember being the linchpin that took us to the State finals. I always stood up for the right thing, whether it was the vegan option in the cafeteria or making sure my sister wasn’t alone the time she broke her arm and spent all Christmas break in the hospital. But a month ago I was talking to my sister, really, arguing with her, and she said I was never there for her, and barely remembers me visiting her. And on an impulse, I started looking up some of my old journals, and they’re kind of shallow. I think of myself as having once been smarter, more virtuous, the best of youth that I claim I don’t see in any of the kids in my classrooms. So I need to go back to see if I really was any of those things, or if I’ve been holding people to an imaginary self my whole adult life. If I’ve been beating myself up, too, for being only a good person when I should have lived up to great potential. I could be better, but I need to know if I’m working to return to being a better person, or to become one for the first time. I’m guessing time travel is the quickest possible journey of self discovery.”

6 comments:

  1. More than one way to travel time.
    ~jon

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  2. This is deep. I reckon it would be a very powerful thing to go back and see yourself as you really were. Nice twist on the regular time travel motivation too.

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  3. Great one here, John. Excellent motivation for time travel. Even with people who keep excellent notes on their lives, how much is embellished, knowingly or not, by the writer?

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  4. As one of my characters says in a WiP, "are we not all heroes of our own stories?" I have to give the narrator a thumbs-up for having the nards to want to see if he lives up to his own hype.

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  5. I'll say this, it's the nicest reson to time travel- not to mess with history, not to change things for the better, but simply to observe. Seems very reasonable.

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  6. LOL... by the end of this, I was wondering if he was going to travel through time via the wormhole in his navel!

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