J.T. vs. Literature

J.T. vs. Literature

This post has little to do with Korea, but it is what is on my mind, at the moment.

I have decided that the very most accurate form of literature today is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. These books have a very special place in the childhood memories of many of us, but most of us have failed to truly understand the implications of what these brilliant authors were trying to teach us. This is mostly a cultural fault. Our modern culture has us studying Vladimir Nabokov and Iris Murdoch in our collegiate English classes. Of course the aesthetics of such works are far more pleasurable, but how many of us need to be warned about becoming creepy, self-delusional pedophiles or semi-evil ex-theater directors with magical cousins and an obsession with the sea? Very few, that’s who. However, the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books teach us some things that are very important about life. In the absence of any easily-found academic material, I will attempt to begin the educating.

• You start with basically no information.

Well, that’s just the reality of life. When you start are “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, you are given a little bit of background, a description of where you are, and then you start. In life you’re first decisions are all basically random as you learn from them, make mistakes and move on. Some of what you learn will be useful later, but much of it won’t. After all, how many times have you needed to remember how to play “Four Square” or recall those ultra-successful “Freeze Tag” strategies you had. I’m getting a little off track here. The point is you start off with almost no information, and that little information you have can quickly become useless or misleading (Girls have cooties? If only it were that simple.)

• Small decisions can have dire effects.

“You are standing in front of a door. On a nearby table is a piece of glass and a cigarette butt. Before going into the door, you take:

-The Glass (pg. 18)

-The Cigarette Butt (pg. 214)

-Nothing (pg. 54)

On page 54: “In the next room you encounter a crazed and bitter hobo. Perhaps if you had a cigarette butt you could offer it to him to help him calm down, or maybe you could use a glass shard to fend him off while you escape. Sadly, you have neither of those things. He disembowels you with his bare hands and offers your intestines to the Hobo gods. They bless him with copious amounts of “Wild Turkey” and some loose change they had in their godly ashtray.”

That was, of course, just to illustrate a point. Just like in life, you often find yourself making what seem to be nearly pointless decisions that will, in hindsight, be some of the most important of your life. This, of course, works both ways, as you’ll find that you may fret over a major decisions for weeks just to learn that, no matter what you do, it won’t make a bit of difference.

• There are far more ways for things to go wrong than to go right.

Here the parallels begin to become extremely obvious. For anybody who has gone back and done the same “Choose Your Own Adventure” book a dozen times, it becomes obvious that getting someplace your satisfied with is darn near impossible, but completely destroying your life through a few hopeless choices is incredibly easy! In fact, within this lesson is two sub-lessons that are also very much worth remembering.

1). “Don’t wish you had your life to do over again, because you’d just screw it up in some different way.” And then, seriously, what kind of excuse would you have? A whole lifetime of experience and you still couldn’t get to second base with that girl from high school? That’s sad, man.

2). “The only way to ensure a happy ending is to start there and work backwards.” Everybody’s done it: looked through the whole book for a good ending, then tried to trace the steps back to get there. It’s definitely too bad this doesn’t work in real life. “Where’s the mystery?” you ask. The mystery can be found as you ponder how you were supposed to know that the toe nail clippers you left behind on page 87 could be used to repair a broken supercomputer that contained the key to everlasting life.

• Good choices don’t lead to rewards, they lead to more choices.

This is, perhaps, the very deepest lesson we all should learn from the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Just like in life, you are given many different decisions to make. Every time you make a decision is a chance to fail. If you don’t fail, it doesn’t mean you’ve succeeded; you simply get to make another decision, which is also a chance to fail. The odds don’t seem so good, eh? But that’s life. Think of all the good decisions you’ve made in your life. Probably a lot, in all reality. Now remember how some really great thing in your life, which you probably made hundreds of good decisions to create, was quickly obliterated with one or two mistakes you couldn’t have avoided without “reading backwards.” It doesn’t really seem fair. There is a great deal of unfairness in the unfair book, but this particular variation probably makes it into the opening pages. It’s very important to remember that, barring making it all the way to the end, there is no number of good decisions you can make that cannot quickly lead to your falling down a trap door into a pit full of brain-starved goat zombies.

What does this teach us about life, in general?

• Luck is the key to opportunity, but not to Success

That’s most of what there is to it. Luck is such a big part of the game of life. That 47 year old man mopping floors at McDonald’s could have just lost his very noble career due to downsizing. That mega-millionaire was probably just born to the right parents, or happened to meet the right people. Certainly the millionaire had to act on his advantages and the mop-master has a responsibility to himself to rebuild his life (which, if you hadn’t realized it, he is actually doing by working for a living instead of just giving up), so there is some control to be had. Just like the books teach us, you’ll probably fail before you succeed. Your choices are clear: give up or try again. And, no matter how many haunted houses and abandoned funhouses there are between you and a 500 year old pirate treasure, you’ve got to try again.