Trying to be, anyway. [ She doesn't plan to flunk out or anything, but one thing she has learned: medicine, particularly when you want to be an actual brain surgeon, is competitive. Gisela is ambitious, but she doesn't like to be presumptuous.
She sits back in her chair while she listens, hands folded on her crossed knees. ]
Confused ones, I guess. Ones that aren't satisfied by anything they seem to find. Which is normal, but the means feel new, don't they? [ She's 22. Probably her perspective on this is not quite what it would be if she were even a decade older, but Gisela is, at least, attuned to the desensitization she sees in people who came up in secure middle to upper-class homes. And it bewilders her that they can seem more jaded and bored with life than the ones who grew up in war zones. ]
I think young people are aware of that paradox, too, which frustrates them. They feel like they've inherited something they can't fix. My fifteen-year-old sister is in that group.
There's another author I like — so this is another philosophy, sort of — and he wrote that irony and cynicism were necessary in the 1950s, but now cynicism, 'cynical transcendence of sentiment', he said, is some kind of fear of being human. So then I consider that maybe people are just more afraid.
no subject
She sits back in her chair while she listens, hands folded on her crossed knees. ]
Confused ones, I guess. Ones that aren't satisfied by anything they seem to find. Which is normal, but the means feel new, don't they? [ She's 22. Probably her perspective on this is not quite what it would be if she were even a decade older, but Gisela is, at least, attuned to the desensitization she sees in people who came up in secure middle to upper-class homes. And it bewilders her that they can seem more jaded and bored with life than the ones who grew up in war zones. ]
I think young people are aware of that paradox, too, which frustrates them. They feel like they've inherited something they can't fix. My fifteen-year-old sister is in that group.
There's another author I like — so this is another philosophy, sort of — and he wrote that irony and cynicism were necessary in the 1950s, but now cynicism, 'cynical transcendence of sentiment', he said, is some kind of fear of being human. So then I consider that maybe people are just more afraid.