Opinion – Romance Novels

So I figured I’d write something that is purely my opinion at this moment in time. I mean, I write a lot about what’s going on in my life and what I’m feeling (and I have my reasons for that) and I figured I’d write something that shared an opinion I have about a given topic. If I offend anyone, that is not my intent, but you can’t blame me for having an opinion.

I’ve pretty much lost all respect for modern romance novels. When I was young and naive, I started reading them in order to have a look through the window and see what awaited me in the world of romance. I remember how I’d get home from school and read at least 100 pages, completely engrossed in this world of perfect love. I would finish each book, ready to start the next, and also finding myself excited for when the love of my life will come into my world and sweep me off my feet. I can’t help but chuckle at how innocent and naive I was. Like any phase, it died and i moved on to other things.

From time to time, I’d pick up a historical romance and endulge in my guilty pleasure. this time more aware that real life doesn’t work like that and just enjoying the fantasy of it all. However, once I started reading classical romances, the likes of Jane Austen, I started to realise how poor these modern books were in comparison. The quality is unmatched and people don’t understand just how bad these books really are.

I started reading this one romance where these 2 business associates decided to have a child together but only to satisfy each others need to have a child without being married, and they each had their reasons for why they don’t want a relationship or commitment of any kind. I mean, the plot is completely predictable, but it started out well and was interesting, yet went downhill shortly after. I’m sorry, but falling so deeply and madly in love after the first time you sleep together? These two people weren’t friends, she just wanted his good genes; they knew nothing about each other. After the first day of spending time together, they are suddenly able to finish each others sentences and know what the other is thinking? I’m sorry, but that is not realistic, not even a slight exaggeration. And besides, what’s the moral of this story? Decide to bear some hot guy’s child with no strings attached, and he’ll fall madly in love with you are serious about carrying his child? The problem I have with this, is that young girls are reading this rubbish and probably don’t realise that this is not what real life and real relationships are like. A lot of the romances out there that are tailored to young girls are aren’t real love. It’s this pathetic excuse for claiming possession of someone, and calling it love.

Love should be written about in its true form. Is love always healthy? no, of course not. But don’t create an unhealthy relationship and bran it as healthy, as something ideal. It’s dishonest and when your demographic is young impressionable girls, it’s irresponsible.

And for the record, Edward Cullen is NO Mr Darcy. Nothing bothers me more than when people say that; they’ve clearly never read Pride and Prejudice. I find it very troublesome that girls are swooning over a pathetic whelp who goes on about how he doesn’t want to live or breathe if he’s not with Bella. That is not admirable, putting the dependency of your life on someone else. Love is about sacrifice, strength, respect, hope, loyalty and wanting to make someone else happy because that brings you joy. Not giving up your own life and being miserable because you can’t be around your ‘love’ 24/7. What does that prove?

As I read over what I’ve written, I feel as though I come across kind of jaded or as if I’m yelling and mad. I’m really not. It’s just that I feel like people don’t have the strength and patience needed to find real love. And I don’t think people even understand what it means anymore. At least the romances I read when I was a teenager, even though they were dramatized, portrayed strength and stoicism as something admirable and attractive, instead of possession, obsession and weakness being disguised as heroic and desirable.

 

Possible Work-in-Progress, eh? eh?

There’s something really great I find about finding something you’d written a while back and had completely forgotten about it. Last summer I started writing segments of this work-in-progress inspired by a conversation with one of my friends at the time. He had told me that he was in a chatroom and met a girl who turned out to have lied to him about pretty much everything, where she lived, even what her name was. He had trusted her completely and said to have even fallen in love with her. They were making plans to live in the same city, but she confessed all this to him in due time.

So this gave me an idea to write a story (I cleared it with my friend) that centers around a young woman who is very naive and boy crazy, but lacks that comfort of talking to the opposite sex in real time. So her love life is trapped in the world of the web. I had completely forgotten that I had written anything about this. I think I might continue it and eventually finish it. I’ll share a passage I found.

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If my feelings are right, and my instincts aren’t playing some nasty game on me, then my suspicions would be right. It would mean that, Jeff, the Texan, is here in the plant…But what the bloody fuck is he doing here? The last time we spoke he said he was in New York… going to school. What could bring him here? I really damn well hope that my instincts are playing a trick on me. Plus I think the guy said his name was Jack, not Jeff. So I’m hoping that I’m terribly wrong and that it’s not him. I just need to see him so that I can be sure. I really hope it isn’t him. I’ll go crazy if it is. Sounds just like him, hence why I’m slightly freaking out…Slightly.

Ok, if it is Jeff, there some things to consider. A) He’ll completely ignore me and act as if I’m some deluded moron B) he’ll start playing up on me, which he tends to do when we’re on MSN. In either case, must keep composure and remain professional. This is a working environment, not a playground.

On other news, I can’t stop thinking about Jay. Why do I still have this attachment to him? It’s been several weeks since I’ve spoken to him….could it be possible that I did actually love him? No, not possible…But I wonder if he ever thinks of me in the way that I’m currently thinking about him. No, no just stop. Stop being ridiculous. I’m over Jay. I’m not going to be some sappy love sick girl who pins after a man she can’t have, and is aware of it. After all, he’s all the way in British Columbia and I don’t even know how to track him down. I’m not going to be bloody Juliet and we all saw how that turned out. I’m over Jay. I’m completely and totally over him…I think I’ll write it on my hand.

Ok, caught a glimpse of the Texan and false alarm, not Jeff. I was sure to study the Texan from afar, and he looks nothing like Jeff’s pictures. It’s some typical looking Texan guy. Oh, and his name isn’t Jack…Don’t know where that came from. I don’t know why I first assumed it would be Jeff. I haven’t spoken to him for months and he never mentioned any travel plans to Canada. And even if he did, of all places to be in Toronto, why would he be here at my work? Just doesn’t make sense. But one thing I still don’t know, who was the guy I saw that I thought was the Texan guy that I thought was Jeff. He had muscular arms and looked like he was walking into the office. Hmm, don’t know what to make of that because I don’t know who that was. Oh well, maybe one day I’ll find out. Muscular arms…makes me thing of Nathaniel…And blue eyes also make me think of him. I’m really hoping his are dark blue. That would be really cool. I can just picture his dark hair and blue eyes, such a contrast, but so sexy.  I can’t wait till he gets here and just see how he looks at me with those blue eyes. I still can’t believe that he’s coming all this way just to be with me.

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Soldiering On, Towards Getting Out

Shakespeare once said that there is no beast crueler than human beings. With the state of the world as it is, with genocides, mass murders, and the killing of innocent children, it’s hard not to agree with him on some level.

Night by Ellie Wiesel is a skinny volume of some of Wiesel’s memories and haunting from the Holocaust; a prime and tragic example of human cruelty. The horrors that lie within are so dark and stomach turning that it’s hard to know where to begin, let alone describe what happened. My copy of Night was the newly revised version and included a note from the author. In his note, he tells us the process by which he went to write it and get his memoir published and also attempts to answer the question on everyone’s mind: How come he felt the need to write this? He explains how he himself doesn’t know the answer to such a question. He didn’t write it for therapeutic purposes, not for historical accuracy, and surely not to make a profit. He wrote it just because he felt the need to write it.

Can anyone really blame him for not knowing why? He experienced horrors that can’t ever be explained or described for someone else to feel the true weight of it. While reading Night, the atmosphere in my mind was instantly darkened and I felt fear as if I was there standing in the crowd watching. Several descriptions of the beatings he took and witnessed made me think I was going to be sick, yet no matter how terrible I was feeling, I knew that it was minute to what they themselves must have felt in the moment and even upon reflection years after.

My next door neighbour is a Holocaust survivor, and while I was reading Night, my mind kept wondering about her and her experiences. She was always quiet and kept to herself, and had a small pleasant smile whenever in conversation. She was always kind, but her eyes were always distant as if she were looking past me. She became even more reserved once her husband passed away, also a Holocaust survivor. For years she hid the numbers on her left arm under long sleeves, but eventually found the strength and confidence to let others see it. 

There’s one thing I always wondered about the victims of the Holocaust and other genocides as well. How did they not loose the will to live? They had everything taken from them, they were tortured, starved, and treated to believe that they weren’t even worthy of being scrum, yet there was always the fear of death. This may sound obscene, but I always wondered how come death wasn’t seen an escape from the pain and suffering they had to endure. I was told once that when someone fears death it means they feel that they have something to loose. Jews, as well as many victims of genocide are minorities, and thus are already seen as worthless. The Jews are a group of people who have been viewed time and time again as people to hate. So during the Holocaust, it wasn’t as if there was anyone who would stick up for them and they were aware of that. Yet, they had such a need to remain alive. In Night, there are many who were described as loosing hope in themselves, in the world and in God, yet they still continued on. Did it have to do with honour? Did they think they deserved it? Was it so that they’d be able to bare witness when it was all over? Or did they not know? Just something inside them continued on, pulling them along, something stronger than them which fed them the strength needed to survive.

I would love to have the opportunity to speak to my next door neighbour or any Holocaust survivor about their experiences in the Holocaust. I’ve always wanted to, because among many other questions, I’d like to ask how did they not loose the will to live?

Overall, I thought this memoir was jaw-droppingly horrific. Not the writing, but the events that lie within. It’s both amazing and disgusting as to what extremes some people go to harm others. I think that whomever bears witness to the cruelty that they’ve been exposed to shows tremendous amount of courage. We don’t always know the reasons why it’s important to speak up about what we’ve been through, but its always important to bring awareness for others to learn and to let others know they aren’t alone.

I took a course on religion during my first year of university, and when we were talking about Judaism, my professor had showed us this music video. While writing this entry, I was reminded of it, and so I thought I should share it.

 

Hello world!

I use to have a blog on another website, but I didn’t really like it all that much. I wasn’t all that interested in updating. So I decided to make a switch to see if I’d like this site any better. But in doing, so I can’t help but file through my past. I’ve been browsing through youtube finding songs that I use to love back in the day. This need to remember who I was a few years ago came upon me unexpectedly after I had read a book about amnesia.

The novel tells the story of a woman who was in a car accident and can’t remember the last 3 years of her life. The book starts off with a prologue where it decribes an extremely awful day. The new club her and her friends went to was  a bus, her new shoes had given her blisters, her boyfriend Loser Dave stood her up, her father had just died the day before, she didn’t get the bonus at work because she missed the year mark by a week and she was standing in the pouring rain trying to get a cab. When a cab finally stopped, some guy tried to steal it from her and when she started to run towards it she slipped and fell. WHen she wakes up in the hospital, she remember the wrong accident. She thinks she had landed in the hospital after the fall when she was at the club, but she was at the hospital because of her car crash which happened 3 1/2 years after the club fall. She’s missing three years of her life. And during that time, she has moved up in the company, she’s no longer friends with her pals, she’s married and has ALOT of money. So she pretty much just tries to piece the past 3 years together throughout the book. And it had me thinking about my own life. I mean, I haven’t suffered from amnesia, but how I was 3 years ago is very different from how I am now.

I was back at my dad’s house during the break and I began digging through my closet and my desk so see what traces of my old self I could find. However, there was very little of anything left from my past. I had destroyed all the papers and school work and journals that I had when I was younger. Why? Because I use to hate my life more than anything and I wanted nothing more to do with it. I didn’t want it to be part of me, having to admit that that’s how I was, that’s what I had to show for myself. I use to think I was pathetic and stupid and I just couldn’t wait to grow up so that I could be different. I destroyed everything just before I came to university. I wanted a fresh start. My past has alot of a good memories, but the ones that tend to stand out in my head were the bad one. Those thoughts that when they start to enter your mind you try to stop them from continueing but fail every time and all the negative emotions about that moment start to come back to you. I don’t know why, but whenever I think of my past it brings sorrow. It’s never bittersweet, just sadness. It reminds of how small and insignificant I use to feel. I like how my life is now for the most part. I’m in control. I feel more confident and I have a better idea of how to stand up for myself and make myself known…in a non-bitchy way, mind you. I laugh and smile more, I feel more alive, as lame as that may sound. I don’t feel the social pressures like a I use to, I don’t feel like everyone is watching me or judging me anymore. And even if they were, who cares? But most of all, what I love about my life now is that I no longer feel….
trapped.