Avoidance

I have this thing I do with unpleasantness, which is to shut my eyes and cover my ears and shout "lalalala!" until it either goes away or, more often, hits me over the head. It makes me a procrastinator at work and school (ugh, voicemail, it'll probably be someone who wants something from me, what do you say we just don't listen to it, huh?), and when I watch movies by myself at home, I often have to stop them for a while to get away from the tension. When I watch them with other people, I just fidget and squirm and sometimes leave the room when there's unpleasantness--like, say, romantic misunderstanding or bad guys lurking behind closed doors.

So right now I'm reading a book called Annie on My Mind, by Nancy Garden, which is one of a long list of young adult novels, past and present, that I've brought away with me from my summer class. This is a book from the early 80s, and is one of the first books to feature young gay protagonists whose "experimentation" is not ended abruptly when one of them dies in a pointed car accident or drug overdose. Anyway, of course that doesn't mean that the course of true love would run smooth, and our heroines are not only caught in a naughty position by the conservative and fussy school secretary (I will point out for the record that they are NOT in a naughty position at school--no one would respect that), but their exposure is about to ruin the lives of two very nice adult characters.

And for the life of me I can't read any farther. It's a fairly short book, and I breezed through 50 pages this morning, then I got to The Scene that had been foreshadowed, and I put it down, but no, I can't do that, so I picked it back up, and put it down a paragraph later, and picked it up and read another paragraph and DARN IT I can't read anymore. It's the equivalent of reading through a crack in your fingers, like how you watch the monster coming in a horror movie.

Incidentally, if the monster really scares you, I've found that watching on mute, without the scary music, can really make those scenes more manageable.

Because I have control of all my neuroses, oh yes.

I'll keep you posted.