Suwa-neazy me-eazy: A confession.

Torn between two lifestyles again—

ONE: there’s the first grader that wants to only live in books, with dynasties, and misguided evil-doers and charismatic, wise old tutors and lifelong kinship with horses, etc and TWO: that every-second-is-lent-to-you-by-luck to enable your personal efforts to slow the snowballing of pandemic poverty, so act accordingly, efficaciously and in good taste.

Suwa-shi is the most selfish place I’ve ever lived, THAT’S for sure. I have health insurance, I throw away leftovers, and I live alone, journal alone, read alone and catch up on the social media I missed as a kid…alone. I’m fascinated, entertained.
What do I remember from my youth?
The day I stopped shopping in the sci-fi, fantasy section. What a painful, terrible memory—like the moment you’re sent to military boarding school and your future is decided forever until the day you sit down in the middle of war and think “what am I doing, and who is it that brought me here?”.

I have a confession to make: I’m a nerdy-ass, super not-cool, sci-fi idiot….the kind that weeps!
Out of desperation that I’m not descended from gods, that I wasn’t orphaned as a kid only to discover later my latent destiny to revive the magic of mankind. I have been in mourning since the day I first put my butt down on the carpet in the Young Adult section of the public library.






I, Olivia, prefer my books today; and movies that take place on planets with beautiful people and righteous royalty…… what makes my books a stranger fiction than what people think about Burma or Tibet or the Arizona border, or child-sex-tourism...all of it is unreal to somebody--most of it is stuff we only read about anyway. Today, let's not feed anybody, let's fall asleep in a heavy fog and wake up with a certainty that this story ends delightfully.

I’ve been in unrequited love with so many facets of a turning page for too long, it's embarassing. I’ve just finally stopped being overwhelmed at the sight of the next blank page, the end of a book, like a genocide; the end of a thousand breathing lives! The melodrama delights me!

This was supposed to be a blog about my love of magic—my little sister’s AP tests are over, and her summer is about to start. She got a job as a lifeguard at a little pool in BG. I want her to run through a meadow and get sunburned and get tan lines and poison ivy and build a tree house and fish in a pond and jump in, and chew stalks of grass and feel the breeze and find a cause (and I hope it’s rooted in magic) but that’s too ambitious. a woman’s shelter, or the kid’s cancer unit….those things, I hear are magical.
I’m just afraid for my baby sister, who is living in a big house in a big suburb, and she doesn’t read sci-fi. How will she ever know that there’s magic all around if she doesn’t hear it whispering in her ear late at night with a flash light and a book just a little too close to her face.