Now For Something Completely Different

Okay, I just finished a good book: The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

It is ultimately a book of hope, but it was a tough book to read. One, it seemed intrusive and wrong for a grown man to be reading a diary of even a fictional teenage girl.

And the story was heart breaking. While it is most obviously about a girl having sex with an adult man, there is nothing erotic about it. It is sad.

And much of the sadness is from how the so-called adults in Minnie's life have no interest in being adults whose role is to protect children--in this case, Minnie, from predators or drugs or alcohol.

I'll tell you what. My daughter will never be left in situations where a predator could take advantage of her (my son, too, for that matter). It doesn't hurt to be reminded that there are slimeballs in the world. And that you may know them already.

And as children, kids are in no position to make adult decisions. Hell, many adults can't make adult decisions. So keep the choices--even the bad ones--safer if you can until they can make the big ones.

But despite the agony of Minnie's life, it was a story of hope, really. Minnie, at the end of the year of her diary, finally recoils from the life she was living. A life she felt empty in, anyway.

So you could see that despite the very bad detour she had in life during that year, she hadn't lost her moral center. She chose to live a better life. And you have confidence that she succeeded. It took the very end of that book to gain that confidence, but I did.

People can become better people. Nothing about your future is written in stone. And as I've always felt, you have no business blaming your parents or anything else in your youth for your life once you hit 30. What did you do to fix your life in the years you were in charge of it, eh?

That's what I took away from the book.

So yeah, this was way different than my usual reading list. But worth it.