Livvi’s Blog

I know it is like quarter-past 2 in the morning or whatever but i feel oddly compelled to talk about dust jackets. I just happened to be reading Paper Towns (yes! i finally started it! more on that later) and i just wanted to see what it looked like without the jacket. The jacket itself is interesting because there are two designs: each with a model depicting the mysterious love-interest of the main character Margo yet one is happy (Mona-Lisa-mystery-smile with yellow background) and one is sad (scowling-blue-background) to emphasise her duality and the fact that the even though she lives next-door and he has known her forever and is madly in love with her….Quentin doesn’t know who she really is.

 So i take off the dust jacket and it turns out the book is black with blue writing on the spine. I know it seems weird to care but…okay i have a lot of books in my house. Most don’t have jackets on….they just hang around. There are books in every single room in my house. And they basically dark. Dark blue or black or deep green or brown. Mainly black. So i found it interesting that An Abundance of Katherines, the book John Green published before Paper Towns, is white. All white with an indentation of a crouching girl on the front and blue writing on the spine. It is so white. Dazzling white. Like…between these covers there is a piece of holy scripture which is nothing to do with God but in fact just reveals the nature of man’s soul to whoever feels he is worthy enough to touch this book, this key to heaven, and you will be afraid but the book will drop from your hands but you will pick it up and kiss it and hold it to you because it is strangelycomforting. Or like not…i should probably mention the actual plot of the book is just kinda light hearted road-trip-teenage-boy-rom-com. I am just someone typing in the early hours of the morning, i am allowed to be dazzled by white books and feel the need to type nonsense. but yeah, An Abundance of Katherines is really good- the plot of the books all seem kind of light-weight etc. but all are so funny and alive and you just won’t regret reading them.

So yeah. You place Paper Towns next to An Abundance of Katherines and it’s like…wow, it is literally and  figuratively dark. When i look at Paper Towns and open it up i expect to see those dark old fashioned pages with a serif font and the book is actually a medical journal with scribblings in the margins and you are reading it- by candlelight obviously- and all these scribblings are hinting at something dark and plots and secrets and you just shut the book and shove it somewhere and decide to reread Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. I am not even a Harry Potter fan- but that is my favourite of the books. I used to read it late at night a lot.

 Actually, i am betting my brothers and father are still awake right now. My mother is the only one who keeps regular hours (have been waiting to use that phrase for a long time. feels oddly appropriate, but i feel like i am about to reveal we have a terrible secret/disease. i don’t. i just find it hard to sleep). I also find it hard to use paragraphs. No idea why. And to indent stuff….what is up with that? I know it might be hard to read a big chunk of text but it is not like i plan what i write,as you may have noticed i just type bullshit as soon as i think it. Who even cares about dust jackets except like book collectors and who cares if some book is white or black (this feels like it should have a deeper meaning. so yes, i also believe that people are equal regardless of skin colour).

But books are just very important to me. Their physical presence is comforting, i hate being in a place with few books, i feel the need to comment if i am like at a house with few books just in case it turns out they do like books- they jut have so many they hire a warehouse for them in which case the lack of books in the house is acceptable. I like the feel of books, the feel of real paper (not that stupid textbook paper), the way a book smells, how easy they are to carry and how even though they aren’t round and curvy or anything but they are still very good to hug. And of course reading itself….yes. Yes. I really just need hand gestures to express what i feel about reading. If hear that someone doesn’t like reading….i don’t stop liking them. I know lots of people who don’t like to read and they are perfectly lovely people. But i am not really close to any of them. It is like a whole world they do not care for, an amazing ly brilliant (at times) universe which i guess i use an escape.

I like to escape from reality i will admit that. Maybe in a kind of unhealthy way. Maybe it is because i am always getting told how i have the potential to do anything i want (and who hasn’t heard that at some point?) but i don’t i instead stay indoors and i read and i daydream and i type away and instead i don’t know…wiki interesting dead people…and i am not even doing anything for New Years Eve . (Koni- Vladimir Putin’s dog- gets to party at New Years at the State Kremlin Palace. or did in 2004 anyway. great.)I never have. My family don’t think it is that big a deal and really it isn’t and i would prefer to stay here but i am always here. Always. My life is just sitting in horrible rooms absorbing stuff. I am a giant sponge. Except i am not even as cool as a giant sponge. I mean, if i knew a giant sponge i would think they were awesome. I would invite it over and be all “hey Sponge dude! What’s up?!” and it would look at me and roll its eyes and then go steal food frommy kitchen. Not like stealing food is cool…it just seems like something a sponge does. It gravitates towards kitchens and therefore food. All the sponges cool friends would be allowed to use it as a trampoline. It would be described as curvy, maybe even bootylicious, bouncy, playful, surprising and just the epitome of awesomeness.

God now i am wishing i was a giant sponge. But you know…at least i have a pancreas. Hahaha! I have a complete digestive system! Sorry. Biology revision. The digestive system is pretty cool. Except the large intestine (….which is mentioned in Dune because the Fremen have larger intestines so they can absorb more water from their food because they live in a desert environment and are just that cool) which is kind of boring. My biology teacher bangs on about the liver a lot….but i still prefer the pancreas.  I never used to know what it did, i just kind of thought i had better not ask because it seemed kind of sinister…just hanging around doing stuff and me not knowing what stuff was. I guess that could be said about a lot of my internal organs.

 I know i still deep down inside think lungs are actually hollow. i just cannot accept that they look like any other hunk of meat. I would be creepy to have big hollow bags inside my body but that is my mental image and that is what i am sticking with. I also didn’t think they did stuff other than breathe- thank you wikipedia. Breathing seems like a big enough task without other stuff but nooooo. Look at them go. Well…imagine them going. Lungs are also fun to draw. I drew a suitably creepy looking one in black biro in my biology book because Hannah had stolen my pencil. I also used to like drawing diagrams of the heart with little arrows to show the blood flow. I do like annotating diagrams. I have no idea how i got to rambling about drawing hearts. I really should put some paragraph breaks in.

Much better. Still reads like a crazy person but never mind. It is now around 3:20 am.  I wish i could write essays as easilyas this. I probably use the word ‘like’ to much, which is odd because i don’t use it often when i actually speak (or at least i hope i don’t). Anyway i am sorry if you read this. My brother mentioned the other day he sometimes reads my blog (he came across it by searching “ben” “brother” “blog” etc. on google. i was about to put a smiley emote there then realised that i am suddenly feeling rather dead). I think people stumble across it thinking it might have pictures of David Tennant. I sincerely apologise.

I never even typed about the Christmas special. We all know that it was pretty bad. Very bad…Christmas specials aren’t allowed to be dark or anything. Also i never feel sympathetic for children on TV. Oh no, some stage school brats are going to get some premature wrinkles from all that frowning. Oh dear. On the plus side the lack of a companion and exclusion of Rosita (honestly. Rosita. Gah.) meant that i could amuse myself by pretending there was an awful lot of sexual tension between David Morrissey and Tennant (oh there so was. At that Christmas dinner thing Jackson Lake was totally going to get hopelessly drunk and plead the Doctor to take him with him to the TARDIS and he would follow him to the edge of the universe and beyond just to be near him….then maybe pretend that he wanted this because the Doctor had saved his life and his son’s life and wanted to repay the debt but the Doctor would totally see through this and be all “Just kiss me Jack!” and…i hope you are all tortured by that mental image forever. goodnight).