Braving Alaska

I finally worked up the courage to read Looking For Alaska. 

Oh God.

I read the first forty pages silently to myself, and then I read everything but the last forty pages aloud to Matt, Alex and Mads. I think the reading aloud gave me something to focus on and kept me from becoming a sad puddle, but it was still rough in a few places. It was fantastic. So good. In a different way than The Fault in Our Stars, which I read last year; that one was like getting stabbed in the gut repeatedly, while this felt like slowly starving to death. So, different kinds of pain. But so good.

Also, I kept picturing Alaska with the same haircut as my friend Amelia, longer in the front and pretty short in the back, because the two of them are remarkably similar in personality and mannerisms and also because Pudge talks more about Alaska's curves than anything else. I think it's more than halfway through the book before we find out what her hair color is. Teenage boys, whaddaya gonna do.

So that was a struggle, but I really enjoyed it and will certainly read it again (once I've had some time to recover.) I don't think I can read another book for a while. This one still hurts.

Meanwhile, I've been spending my weekends barricaded in the art building. This weekend I'm making a tree stump fairy house out of cardboard and zip ties. The plan is to put a live video camera in the bottom, so when you crouch down and peer in the front door, your eye is projected up to a monitor in the upper half of the stump, so whoever looks at the monitor sees what the fairy would see if she was looking out of her house.

Cheers all. Read Alaska. She's worth the emotional trauma, I promise.

Commander Kip
"It's my fox hat."

Normal is overrated!