only one of many things i’m weird about

Ok SO. The thing about my undergrad program at Unwashed Pinko University was that it was populated by some of the snottiest, more pretentious weinerdogs I have ever had the displeasure to know (also by some of the awesomest most hilarious champions of the world, but that’s not who we’re talking about today). Lit classes in particular were an orgy of sad sack boys from New Jersey in Malcolm X eyewear and Urban Outfitters cowboy shirts whining on about David Foster Wallace for an hour and forty-five minutes twice a week. Kill me.

So there I was in my polo shirt and flip-flops, and like, I’m not an idiot. I did the reading. I said semi-intelligent things every once in awhile. But MAN, there is nothing that makes a snotty pretentious weinerdog decide you are a moron faster than a Vera Bradley tote bag and a soft spot for YA lit. This one kid (we’ll call him Snotty Pretentious Weinerdog #1) in particular hated me so much that he made it his mission to loudly disagree with every point I made and write obnoxious writing-workshop cliches like “this ending doesn’t feel earned” on all the short stories I handed out.

Those endings were TOTALLY EARNED, OKAY?

Okay.

So anyway, SPW#1 worked in the library at Unwashed Pinko University, and one day he was behind the desk when I went to check out some books, among them Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. “Oh man, I love this book!” said SPW#1, with more enthusiasm than I’d heard from him all semester. Then he looked up and saw it was me. “I…don’t really think you’re going to like it.”

!!!!!

Jerk. Oh I was so pissed. “I think I’ll do just fine,” I said, as snarkily as I possibly could, and flounced out of the library.

But here’s the ball buster: I EFFING HATED THE CORRECTIONS. It sucked. It beyond sucked. It contained not one single likable character. It taught me not one truth. And it was like eleventy thousand miserable pages long, so the damn thing took me like two and a half wretched weeks to plow through. But none of that mattered: what mattered was that SPW#1 didn’t think I could do it, and I WAS GOING TO PROVE HIM WRONG.

So I did.

I finished it. I persevered. And when I returned it to SPW#1 at the library I smiled, looked him dead in the eye, and told him it was one of the best books I’d ever read.

The point of all this is that you’d think I’d be over that kind of absurd nonsense by now, but the fact of the matter is I have a complex about doing stuff, literary or otherwise, just to prove to other people that I can. And when I took on the Great Pulitzer Read-Through of 2009, I knew the final hurdle was going to be 2001’s winner, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I can’t tell you how many people whose opinions I trust and respect have told me I’m going to love this book, but in reality I’ve read the first hundred pages on three separate occasions, and not once have I felt compelled to keep going. It’s long. It’s dense. And frankly, it’s kind of boring.

I bet SPW#1 keeps it on his bedside table. 

Still, the project is winding down, I said I was going to do it, and now that the time has come there’s no way in hell I’m not going to buckle down, soldier on, and make it through this book once and for all. 

Just to prove that I can.