I can’t sleep. So I’ll blog.
I decided today that since I had nothing else to do I’d finally read something by Franz Kafka. I always loved the Kafka jokes in Calvin & Hobbes and Daria, but never really fully understood them. (a la Hobbes claiming that if he didn’t get a good night kiss he’d have “Kafka dreams”, and then all the repeated references to Calvin waking up one day as a bug.) I went looking on the Internet and found ‘The Metamorphosis’ available for download. I read all the way through it, and honestly, I’m quite fascinated. His writing style is so simplistic, yet it attacks an array of very strange subjects and bizarre situations. For example, in ‘The Metamorphosis’, it talks about a man named Gregor who one day wakes up to find that he has somehow turned into giant beetle. This may sound like odd science fiction, but the way Kafka handles it is amusing and confusing at the same time. He never explores *how* this happened, or why. It just happened, and then explores how these people deal with the fact that this man has turned into a gigantic bug.
May sound stupid, I know. But there’s symbolism involved. Serious symbolism. And today I think I really understood it. Isolation, feeling different, and the effects those can have on familial structure. I don’t know if that’s what Kafka was going after, since I hardly know a thing about him as a person. But that’s what I got out of it in a nutshell. Here’s this man who was happy, things were going well, then something happens. Something inexplicable and unexpected. He changes, he adapts, but how well? He becomes barricaded in his room, isolated from everything else, and he struggles between humanity and being an animal. It’s extremely odd and fascinating at the same time.
Want to read it? Download it here. Sign my guestbook and let me know what you think of it.
So, what am I up to tomorrow? I’m heading out to a gigantic shopping mall, where I’ll meet a nice internet friend of mine; Devin. He found my blog a while back and we’ve been emailing for a while. He’s having surgery on Thursday, so I’m going to bring him a nice little Get Well present – he deserves it. And besides, I hate seeing people undergo surgery without the necessities of life in recovery.
Hmm… what else. I think that’s about it for right now. Maybe I should try to sleep. I think I shall. ‘Night.