Lazy

So I'm reading "A Kiss in Time" by Alex Flinn. It's actually a lot better than I thought it would be. This is from the same author who wrote "Beastly" and "Cloaked." "A Kiss in Time" is Sleeping Beauty's tale...only changed a little. Instead of stopping right after her prince wakes her, it goes on to tell their tale and to show what happens after they awake and supposedly live happily ever after.

At one point in the book, Talia, the princess, is having a conversation on an airplane (a magic flying ship) and says,

Jack's the narrator

She purses her lips in this weird way she does. "What is a movie?"

"It's like television." She saw TV last night at the hotel. "You watch it to

kill time on the plane."

Please, please, let her at least watch a movie.

"Kill time?"

"You know, make it go faster."

"Why would you want to do that?"

"Because it's boring, sitting and doing nothing."

"But you are doing nothing in the sky! How can that be boring?"

I shrug. "To most people, it is."

"Try being asleep for three hundred years. Then you will

know what boring is."

I don't say anything. I'm one of those people who wants to sleep.

"Everything is boring to you, isn't it?" she says.

 "That's not true."

Is it?

"Oh, no?" She tips her feet to look at the airline slippers again. "Let me

see...your parents sent you on a tour of Europe for...how long?"

"A month. I've been gone three weeks. But I don't know what that's got to do--"

"Three weeks at great expense. And during that time, you've

visited how many countries?"

I count on my fingers--England, the Netherlands, France, Belgium..."I'm not sure.

Five or six, maybe. It's all a blur."

"All a blur," she mimics, then laughs. "But in any case, you have viewed

great masterworks, marvels of architecture, historical sights, and you have

generally found it to be, on the whole, quite dull. Is that the case?"

When she put it that way, it sort of makes me sound like a jerk. But she's not getting the

reason why I didn't want to go.

"Look, you don't understand. My parents, they just sent me to fulfill some

fantasy they have about having a son who's into that stuff. I never get any

chance about what I do in the summer. After I get home, they're going to

want me to take an SAT course and get a job. It's all about them."

"I do not understand about not getting a choice as to how to live one's life?"

I shrug. "Besides, the tour bus sort of sucked."

"Ah. So, in order to get away from the sucking tour bus--"

"Sucky."

"Beg pardon?"

"Sucky. You would say the bus was sucky. That's what Americans would say."

"Thank you. So, in order to get away from the sucky tour bus, you sneaked off,

found a lost kingdom, entered a castle, kissed a princess--an incredible

beautiful princess who had been asleep for centuries due to a curse placed

upon her at birth by an evil witch--caused a fracas, were thrown into a

dungeon, escaped, and traveled cross-country with that

same incredibly beautiful--"

"Not to mention modest." I know I shouldn't interrupt her or I'll never get my

earbuds in, but it's tempting.

"Incredibly beautiful and intelligent princess. And still, your are quite bored, Jack, so

bored you cannot wait to put in you ear buds and

be done with this conversation and this voyage."

I fumble with the earbuds guiltily.

"So my question to you, Jack, is what is it that you do not find boring?"

So there are a couple things I want to point out that I was thinking about when I was reading this passage.

1. The world has become LAZY!!!
Talia made a great point. Jack did amazing things while on his month trip, and he still found it boring and couldn't wait to get back home. He had all this adventure in three days, and he still is wanting to find something new and exciting to do. If you think about it, we do amazing things everyday:

1. Talk on a phone.
2. Ride in a car/bus/taxi, that without that, would take DAYS to get to every place we need to go in one day.
3. Use a computer.
4. Fix our hair (hairdrier, straightening iron, curling iron, moose, gel, hairspray)
5. Drink out of container that can keep drinks hot OR cold for days.
6. Use air conditioning.
7. Use the heater.
8. Watch TV.
9. Read books.
10. Listen to music through a "minuscule box, all so that one can listen to music without the bother of having it performed..."

If you think about it, we do extraordinary things everyday and we over look them. Over the past one hundred years we have changed completly. Technology has gotten better (and scarier), girls are dressing more....openly, boys are dressing more...baggy, our government has changed to where we put it all on a couple people, then complain about their thoughts. We follow "celebrities" around so that they can no t have a normal life because we are always watching.

We have become lazy! Nothing we do is fun anymore. We always have to have new stuff to do and new things to amuse us. Why can't we just be us and not have to have someone sitting there entertaining us?

2. Families are not family anymore.

Think about the last time your whole family sit down to have a meal together. No TV. No cell phones. No outside world. Just you and your family. If you still live at home, you mom, your dad and your siblings, sitting at the family table and talking about your day. Asking thought provoking questions. Really interested in eachother and what has happened in the last twenty-four hours.

Now of you do that every night, good for you! That is great!!! But most families get their own food when they get home, or seperate to different rooms to watch their own TV shows on their own TV's. We really don't consider dinner as a time to catch up with our family. It's so sad. Mother's and Father's pushing their children to do so many great things, just to find that their child doesn't want to do what they are forcing them to do. And children staying away from parents and running to friends and they are not getting good advice from their friends because the friends are not getting good advice from their parents. It's a never ending (and very sad) cycle. 

We need to back to being families and sticking together and noticing how fun and exciting life really is. Once we get that settled, everything will fall into place.