Lucky Girl - Completed

"hellohannah2;c-18217398" wrote:
@haneul I know that feeling - I'm so so bad at keeping up with stories, life gets in the way, you have to read at your own pace.
When I wrote this chapter, I was reflected on an experience I'd had around Evie's age - i think I mentioned that earlier in the thread, and for me, it was a sweet and exciting experience. I didn't really think about how an adult might see it, but I guess that's always going to happen when you're sharing a story. Everybody sees things totally uniquely, no matter what the subject matter is, there are no two people who will come to it with the exact same feelings. I'm learning to let go of control of the narrative and how it comes across, because I just can't make anybody read into it the way that I want them to - it's actually really interesting. Lots of people will think that Evie and Jude's situation is frightening, and I completely understand why, but it's the kind of dumb thing lots of kids would do without thinking about the consequences of it. I'm coming back to unexpected cultural differences again and again to my surprise. I don't know if we were brought up with the same stranger-danger caution in Ireland as in other countries. Crime is so low, bad things rarely happen. My friends and I ran wild back in the 00s/10s and nobody seemed to care.

I definitely understand why it may be frightening to some as well. Exploring an abandoned building sounds like a fun, dumb thing kids would do. I would have wanted to do it too... haha. I'm not sure if I would have, but I would have considered it because I was always up for an adventure. I wanted to say that I was in a low crime area as well, but my friends and I also traveled places where crime wasn't so low (NYC) and still acted the same. Maybe MZ generation feels a bit safer about these things because we've grown up with cell phones, it's fairly easy to keep track of where someone is, and the culture is at least slightly less victim-blamey.

I want to give Evie a shot of self-confidence, some youthful exuberance: Jude is too hot for her, she doesn't want him to see her books or her art... He's absolutely not and her books/art are fine. I wish her friends and family would rally around her more so that she doesn't feel so small.

I think about how I do. I’m a clinger and I always have been, so his philosophy on life is totally foreign to me, just like the idea of jetting off to some unknown city all on my own without speaking the language or knowing how a single thing in its society operates. I think that he’s much braver than I am for doing it, but I’m a little sad that he’s going. Maybe in a parallel universe he and I would have attended the same art college and been friends who hung around in Dublin together after our respective classes, sitting outside coffee shops in the city and talking about art and sculpture and our silly assignments, but none of that will happen. In a few weeks he’ll be gone forever and I will likely never get to see him again.

Perhaps she's just a realist, but it's interesting to me that her imagination is so limited. She can travel too - it doesn't have to be scary and one can always learn something of a city's language and society before visiting it (go to the library, pick up a book, do a Google search, etc.). Why would she never see him again? He could invite her to hang out in Berlin. It's not that far.

Of course, my own background continues to influence how I read this. Since I was about 12 years old, it was clearly understood at school that everyone would be going different places for college. The idea of everyone staying in the same place or generally staying together was never a thing (if the whole city sends only 5 people to X uni., it's pretty clear we all can't go there - some people will need to go to Y uni. or Z uni...). So to not be weird or sad about it, by the time high school was ending, we planned to visit one another randomly (when the flights were cheap!) and get together when everyone returned for holidays. Maybe we would have sounded a bit like Jude, like where we were was somehow not good enough or that we were too good to stay. I imagine that can become a touchy subject quite quickly.

I look forward to getting to the chapters where I get more insight into his personality and his family background.