The Book Bully

I bet you can guess what kind of person I am. No. Not that. Try again. I am the kind of person who always  thinks the book is better than the film adaptation of it. I temporarily reneged that belief when I fell in love with the 2005 Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice  - Mr. Darcy's hand flex after helping Elizabeth into the carriage! The argument in the rain! Donald Sutherland and Mr. Bingley! Ribbons! Yes, I love everything about that film, and I felt it captured sort of a more ... repressed passion than the book. But then I re-read the book and I decided I have to love them equally. A few weeks ago I read Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants . The first I had heard of this book was when the movie came out last year and the book was suddenly on every front table and display shelf in bookstores across the country. I immediately wrote it off because 1: Robert Pattinson (I can't forgive him for going Cedric Diggory to Edward Cullen. Traitor.) and 2: the

Sometimes you get stuck in a rut. You want things to change, to grow, to be better. You want yourself to be better. You want to make changes and to start all the things you set out to do and finish everything on your to do list. You see what your life could be and you want so badly to become it. But you get stuck, rooted in the place where you are, so all that you want to be becomes all that you once were. Your routine becomes all that you can manage, and that itself is often too great of a task sometimes. And all of this stagnation is exhausting and infuriating and it seems better and easier and perhaps even predestined that you will be who you were forever. These past two days have made me feel, for the first time in a long time, that I don't have to be who I thought I was, and that I don't have to become myself all alone.

Remember when I wrote in this post that I had written my last English exam ever? Turns out: I lied. I wrote a final English exam on Wednesday, and I wrote my Communications exam today, marking the end of my semester. While I still don't like exams - mostly because I'm awful at studying and bad at time management and often lose notes and always guess incorrectly at which questions will be on the exam, I don't hate them as much as I used to. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, or maybe it's because I've finally mastered the art of writing a perfectly acceptable boring conclusion, or maybe it's because I'm finally starting to see the value of an in-class exam as a way to not focus on the meticulous nature of writing essays but placing value on content and how well you can link ideas and themes across different texts. Or maybe I've just stopped caring. Either way, I'm done another semester. Another ending at MUN; another few weeks spent