inspired by a good friend, i’ve decided one of my new year’s resolutions should be to never stop learning. this year i’m attempting to educate myself via nonfiction literature. appropriately i guess, i’ve picked up several books on the history of the israeli-palestinian conflict to begin with.
recently i saw on facebook that one of my friends had written a.. rather opinionated commentary about the war in gaza. he took exactly the position i’d assumed he would based on his background. call it the communications major in me, but so many times amidst controversy i wonder how much actual fact is involved in the shaping of one’s opinion and how much of it comes from the deep ideologies we already have. if nothing else, i’ve learned to recognize that in myself and want to hold off on formulating an opinion until i look further for the truth. as much truth as i can find, mediated, anyway. i scoured the headlines and online sources for awhile but honestly it just makes me frustrated how terribly biased everything is. i wanted someone to give me just the facts–the dates and names and wars and treaties and why things happened…
and so i’m reading. readers, textbooks, documentaries, commentaries. and i love it, which was a surprise to me, since i absolutely hated it in college. i’ll be the first to admit i know very little on the topic, but seriously, the beauty of it is that we can fix that so simply.. by just wanting to learn.
anyway. it’ll take me some time to get through this but my NEXT topic of interest will be… how wall street works. if anyone has any recs, gimme a holler. :)
right now i’m reading a book called the time traveler’s wife. it’s about a couple named henry and clare and the unusual life they lead due to henry’s propensity for time travel. the friend who lent it to me has a thing for beautiful love stories (hi holly) so i had some natural assumptions about this one. i embarked on the book, thinking it was some epic classic love story, about a perfect couple upon whom the world throws impossible odds.
so i was surprised to find that in fact, the characters aren’t all that saintly (read: it ain’t nicholas sparks). in fact they’re pretty ordinary, with scars and secrets and plenty of skeletons in the closet. but their love for each other is deep, like a flowing well in which all their mistakes and betrayals get lost. it is beautiful in a way that transcends the human.
i thought about this for a long time, in the context of why i personally am constantly attracted to the flawed. i wondered if maybe i have a superhero complex. or if i just really like pain. but.. perhaps i just think it’s an incredibly beautiful thing for an imperfect person to be capable of the divine–messy, but true, love.
oh, i know it’s idealistic. that’s hard-wired in me.
