[narrative] we remember best the secrets we don't keep
the secret is this: you have always been different.
when you were five you were in love with ms. chote. she had light curly hair and a necklace made of red glass beads; they caught the sun when she stood by the window. you watched red light scatter like dandelion fluff, and when she laughed you smiled. when she did you could see her one silver ( Read more... )
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iii like the bits where it goes "you say:" or w/e instead of like, thingie marks (INOWERDZ) to denote speech. beeeecause I did something similar, and am made of ego, basically. but it is a cool device to use, and used right (which it is here) it works really well. Sometimes it takes me out of a story, buuuut this was done in a style to which it was appropriate. A+ for you there.
i keep imagining mr chote and mr brosnahan as either hot female versions of themselves (ms chote looks a lot like elizabeth in my head, despite description, because mr chote had that kind of dignified face, i know what i mean fuck you) or like...themselves in drag. which is lolsy, and totally inappropriate, but blessedly it does not take me out of the story at all, because i wait until afterwards to lol. and it's kind of fascinating in a really bizarre way that like...if they were womens, i could see them saying the things these fictional characters who only share their names are saying. so that's ( ... )
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A) YES, with the smart kids getting screwed over, it is, as i have said, thinly veiled bitchery on my part. some of that is my own experience, some is working with other teachers.
TRUFAX: i got in trouble in school once because i was reading while the class was watching a movie. it was idiotic and about talking raccoons and had NOTHING to do with anything we were doing. how...is that productive, i ask you.
UM ANYWAY. i always feel like when i'm using the second person, quotation marks really break up the flow of the text, so i tend to go with the you said / she said thing.
ahahah also i appreciate that you can read it coherently even though you see male teachers. i like...specifically asked you for names of teachers you liked, because i didn't really want the teachers to be bad people or w/e even though they were Doing It Wrong, they just didn't get it. Which I think makes up about 80% of west's character: not being got ...yes, i too know words.
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anyway: yy, now that you mention that i think it makes a lot of sense; when i wrote a second person narrative for spacediplomacy, back in the day, i actually avoided using any dialogue at all, even though conversations took place. which worked for what i was doing, which was completely different to what you're doing here ( ... )
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One thing I find interesting is the no-caps thing. I don't know if that's just that you weren't bothered to capitalize stuff, or if that was a conscious decision about how West thinks/writes -- I'm guessing the latter, but could be wrong -- but either way, it works better than I would normally think, given how much it would annoy me in other contexts.
Meanwhile, totally agreed on the whole "when you realize you're a little weird, you tend to make yourself more so as a defense against how people might react" thing. I didn't have the "so bored by class being beneath me that they think I'm special ed." thing, though I did have a hell of a time with basic arithmetic in first grade that my parents put a lot of effort on their own to get me past. (Like, seriously, I'd struggle and finally get that "2 + 3 = 5", and then get handed "3 + 2" and totally not get that you can swap the numbers and see that it's also 5. That I'm ( ... )
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And OKAY! I THINK I WILL SURVIVE THE LONG HOURS, JERI! Also, maybe I'll actually get work done. :-P
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with West, like...you get the impression that this is a very appearance-oriented school -- everything is fast and shiny and astonishingly clean, from what I remember of HS, but. it's not even the typical clique thing, it's just that the place seems so slick and LA and I can't imagine a kid as drawn toward getting a chance to be himself as West is would appreciate that, even if he weren't a very smart flyboy.
ALSO? ALSO? "This House" is an awesome song, I used it for a crazysauce character once upon a time. the end.
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Hahah yeah, I remember how you were saying he wears his clothes like he doesn't particularly care about them, and that is so different from what they keep pointing out about the rest of the school, for instance. I think it's worth noting that he's a transplant to the LA area (from St. Louis, of all places!!) and hasn't been like...raised in that atmosphere.
AND UM hahaa oh god we identify with our characters FUCK CHARACTERBLEED, RUN
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