My grand epiphany came when I saw that the Latin word for "queen" is "regina." My oh, my oh! Is it just coincidental that the Queen Bee in Mean Girls is named Regina George? I think not. This secret code grabbed me by the collar of my T-shirt... I saw Latin inscribed on the brick walls of churches, on college brochures, everywhere!
I even found more characters lurking about with Latin names. The movie Mr. Nobody features a character named Nemo Nobody. How Clever I thought to myself while snapping (a writer's way of applauding) that the clever writer of this script double emphasized "nobody." How? Well, obviously "nemo" translates to nobody! His name is Nobody Nobody!
Maybe my idea of a "message" is different from the oh-so-typical, but when you begin to see patterns, it's easy to foil the memos of the media. It's even easier to want to fit in with whatever "in" thing the media is throwing at ya. (So maybe I fall guilty to having HAD an Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook... LAME LAME LAME, I know.)
I have strayed from that pack of sheep that graze on the tastiest social media sites. I will admit, you can find me cozied up, homework off my mind, with Netflix rolling on either a laptop or on our family TV. Waking up late on Saturday mornings, you may find me in bed with Tumblr displayed on my phone screen. You may even catch me out in public snapping a four second pic for my Snapchat story! Oops.
I cannot pull myself aside from the musical and movie media I have learned to love. My Pandora stations vary from Besame Mucho to Queen to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. As sad as it is to admit, it is beautiful to have such variation at my fingertips. I can click. Click. Click. And find myself falling in love with a song I may have never heard!
Abandoning the popular social media sites have cleared my mind. I always felt that I never used Instagram or Twitter for myself, never posted pictures or tweets to let people know what I was up to. I used them to "stalk" the people of this world, maybe classmates, maybe celebrities, maybe teachers' kids whose names I have no idea how I uncovered. Why waste my time when I can collage with magazine scraps?
On a foggy February morning, months after I had deleted my Twitter account, my dad mentioned an interesting NPR topic: boredom. Do we, in this day and age with satisfaction, easy access, phrases pre-written for us, know what boredom really is? The main reason I limit myself these days with social media, texting, electronics, and headphones is because of the interesting words of Dan Deacon: "If you're not bored, you're mind is never gonna wander."
This imagination of mine will continue to wander. Maybe it will walk through YouTube, skip through Huffington Post, or jog by NYU Local taking a quick break at Netflix, but eventually it will get a running start and wander far off onto some luxurious beach in Rio de Janeiro.
"Not all those who wander are lost," and believe me, though at times I may look lost in thought, I am wandering and wandering and wandering...
