Monday, October 4, 2010

Perfection

It’s forty degrees outside, rainy and windy. Reminds me of Norway. I love it. :)

Perfection. Is there such a thing? Well not to me.

My daughter’s best friend has discovered a new favorite word, ‘disgusting.’ Everything is now ‘disgusting’ –my son sneezing in the other room, my daughter’s liberal use of the word ‘butt’ (which I believe is prompted by the use of disgusting –a veritable circle, that), people kissing… the list goes on --and mostly centered around people and their bodily functions.

And it got me thinking; yes, people ARE disgusting. We fart, sneeze, cough, spew things from orifices –hopefully not all at once! We say the wrong thing, make mistakes, trip, stub toes, cry, laugh... In short, we are not perfect. There is beauty in that. We are all connected by this imperfection. It makes us human.

And yet we all seem to strive to be perfect, get upset when we are not. It is an effort in futility and frustration. Am I saying that we should give up and simply be? Not make any effort? No. But perhaps we need to give ourselves a break every now and then. And perhaps, when we craft a character, we need to remember these common threads. What is it about your character that makes him or her human? We all want to craft extraordinary characters. Yet by making them human and then having them go forth and live despite all the setbacks, the fear, the bumbling and procrastinating, the failures that humans encounter will make them extraordinary.

Hell, as I type this I realize that good old Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage) says it much better. "Snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect..." LOVE this movie!


3 comments:

  1. I've just been thinking about this *exact* topic the last couple of days, Miss K. Having just finished reading Pat Barker's Regeneration series, I've gone straight back and started reading it all over again. It's that amazing.

    And the main character is one of the most dreadfully flawed men I've ever come across- I mean, without giving too much away, I can tell you he's sexually dysfunctional to quite a staggering extreme, to the point where he has sex with a lady who breastfed him as a baby (not his mother, FYI (g)).

    Dude! He's seriously reprehensible- and yet I will never, never forget him. His flaws, made extreme by the circumstances of war, make him so undeniably real that in the end you want him to live on and keep shagging as many random men and women as he can get his hands on. No, really!

    Well, you get my point. I agree with you entirely. Not that I expect to have my peeps letting rip with the farting and the spewing- I get more than enough of that from my toddler- but I certainly will have an eye on their level of realism.

    ReplyDelete
  2. He sleeps with his wet nurse? Gak! LOL.

    Letting rip.. tee hee. Yeah, we certainly get enough of that with kids.

    Diana does good *cough* farting scenes. :) Hmm... maybe we should have a little contest here one day... write a good character scene involving a basic bodily function that DOSEN'T turn us off?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ah, this is what I was trying to do with Rosa and her spectacles... but I'm worried that vanity might win out. It's so darn easy to write characters who don't have physical limitations. But is it realistic?

    ReplyDelete