catching up

I’ve been tired all week. Between lengthy sessions of watching “Bleak House,” seeing “Les Miz,” working, watching a Richard Lewis DVD, more “Bleak House,” and a night of limericks, I finally got some sleep last night.
All the listed activities were worth the time invested and sleep lost, but it made blogging difficult. The more tired I get, the more events seem irritating or even depressing rather than humorous. So I decided to just stick with the headline poems.
But now I’m back, I hope.

Yesterday, for example I learned from Madge that the reason she was such a sassy brat the night before was because she had been reading Harry Potter. While reading, she identified with our dear Harry and equated us, her parents (Julie in particular), with Umbridge. So, of course, she had to lash out.
See, today I find it funny. Yesterday it was so-so. The day before it would have made me mad.

We got to trudge through the snow a lot, too, and I got to tell Madge how I used to pretend I was walking through the wilderness in search of help for my trapped family and I had to watch out for wolves and traps and weak ice. She was very excited by all this. Hopefully I can get her to read some Jack London as a result.

Both of these incidents lead me to another observation. I have noticed, when kids play, that they like to identify with characters from movies or books. “I’ll be so-and-so. Who do you want to be?” And then they act out what happened or take it further.
I tend to think of characters, mostly, in terms of whether I like them or not. First, whether I like them as characters, then, whether I’d like them as friends or how I’d deal with them if they were real people. Sometimes I even think, “What would I do in that situation?” Hardly ever do I think, “I want to be him or her.” (Though sometimes I realize, of a character, often someone I don’t really like, “Hey! That’s me!”)
I wonder when in our lives this change happens? Is it a change in us or a change in the books we read?

A mixture of both, obviously.

And now I should probably take off my Princess Leia costume and go shopping or something.