Friday, February 29, 2008

remember me

I just finished the new book by Sophia Kinsella, Remember Me? I love Sophia Kinsella. She’s a British author that has a fantastic writing style. I really enjoy her stuff. It’s not the most intellectually in-depth, Proust/Tolstoy/Faulkner/Hemmingway - like stuff, but I really like it.

Her latest is about a girl named Lexi. The year is 2004, and Lexi is your average 25-year-old “normal” girl. She has mousy brown, frizzy hair, bad teeth, a crappy dead-end job, and is a bit overweight. She is out with some friends, and in her attempt to hail a taxi, she slips and falls, hitting her head on the sidewalk. When she wakes up, she is in a hospital, and is shocked to discover that it is 2007. But, in a small twist, she hasn’t been in a coma this entire time. Rather, she is surprised to learn that she was in the hospital after being in a car accident five days earlier.

As she then learns, she is skinny, has fantastic hair, perfect teeth, a top executive job in the company she was working for, oh, and the perfect, drop-dead gorgeous husband, who is a bazillionare. She is diagnosed with focused amnesia…in other words, the last 3 years of her life are completely wiped out, including the personality that she has become. The rest of the novel follows her as she tries to discover who she is now, and all of the discoveries that are involved with that.

I can’t imagine losing a large chunk of time in that manner. I know I don’t remember most of my childhood, but that’s different. I didn’t just wake up and have the last three years of my life gone. I do have a friend that has three days missing from his life, when he was overseas in Vietnam during the war. It’s crazy.

I am impatient with things in life sometimes though. I have often thought that there are things that I would like to do/change, but I don’t have the patience to wait for them to happen. I’d love to get my teeth fixed, but I don’t want to wear braces for several years. I want to be skinner, but I don’t have the patience for long-term dieting. I would like to learn a musical instrument, or another language, but yet, I want to be good now, not 3 years from now. How nice it would be to just wake up and it be three years later…skinner, tanner, perfect teeth, married, etc.

But, as Lexi discovered, it’s not always about the destination…it is sometimes about the journey. I would miss a lot of things in those three years….Clayton, Nathan and Scott all starting kindergarten, for example. Numerous big moments in the kids’ lives. While it would be nice to wake up and be married, I would miss not having a wedding day, or an engagement, or even dating.

If you could skip three years, would you? What would you miss if you did? The more I think about, the more back and forth I go on the idea. I see the good parts and the bad parts. If I could skip ahead for some things, and stay in the present for others, but I guess that’s not really an option. Jury’s still out.

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