Something smart

at least I hope it will be. Truth be told, whenever I start one if these sodding things I wonder if anything intelligible will come out in the end.

Today was a day I once more felt the belittling touch of my father's affection. I've never even felt adequate when around him... no wait, that's not entirely true, when me and my comrades in oars won the state championship in rowing, I was, if only for a moment, the shining jewel in his fatherly crown. When I stopped rowing, so stopped his attention. And stupid me, I have been trying to get it back every single day until halfway through my therapy.

I wrote lyrics and sang in two bands, in the last band I also helped with the arrangements; I co-authored a book on role-playing games, nothing I am particularly proud of, but still; now I'm readying to publish my second novel... other parents would be supportive of their son's creativity, would have encouraged their kid to be whatever he wanted to be... sadly, my father is one of those people who does not know how to read a book, trusts only the sad little newspaper he reads, and has never even tried to leave the confines of his narrow mind.

A lot of the times, I can wipe it aside, the kindly meant words that hurt to my core... he tries, I tell myself, he tries to be a father, which is more than he did when you were young. I know he can't change, a failed marriage and an intellect forged by his parents, both his parents were hardcore Nazis, make of it what you will, bear witness to the person I tried so hard to see me for who I was instead of the brainless jock he wanted me to be.

I must thank my father for a lot of things tho, he and my mother sent me to the US as exchange student, which basically started my love for the English language. Without my father's disinterest in me, I might have never found my love for books and music.

Emotionally, my protagonist and I are almost at the same level, mainly living in our heads, trying to understand why people like us when we at times have trouble liking ourselves.

Being smart is a bitch, being "gifted" is worse. Being 30something years old and having your mother, a teacher, tell you about a seminar she had just taken part in which dealt with recognizing "gifted" children at an early age, running a mental checklist, checking off every single symptom she lists, is so far away from happiness a neologism is sorely needed.

We all have our demons, the shit we carry with us, writers, readers, non-readers, smart, normal, stupid, we all have them, and us writers, we need them for without the pain that nags us every single fucking day, we would be unable to imbue the same into our characters. We write about people, give them our traits, positive and negative, and while I would like to believe our positive traits are prevalent, it is the pain, our pain that makes these characters accessible for others.

A perfect character, a Superman, is boring. If each character we write were the best, conversationalist, archer, sword fighter, rider, pilot, driver, academician, shit would get boring fast. Give me hurt, jealous, miserable, afraid, lonely... is it nice to live with these things? Fuck no! But each of these make our characters more accessible, because everyone of us has experienced one or the other. And while lovesick might be appealing in a romance novel, we fucking hate this part of ourselves, so please don't, just don't.