unless i know what i'm blogging about.
like, YES I'M GOING TO BLOG ABOUT VAGINAS AND IT WILL BE GLORIOUS
and then like, it just kind of flies out of my fingers and it's completely natural and everything is right with the world.
and then i'm not entirely sure what to blog about, and i run around and make lists and have anxieties and i just worry. how will i make a good post for you lovely readers if i have no idea what to blog about?
still trying to figure out why the student life office hired me to blog for them.
if i'm a woman of my word, i'm supposed to blog about odd thomas today.
i'd marry the CRAP out of that man. i really would.
see, but here's this other dilemma. i'm at work and emma is telling me how much she wants to read odd thomas because i'm tweeting obsessively about my odd thomas feelings.
because i get those. that's why i want to blog about odd thomas.
and she's like, okay, you can blog about odd thomas, but you can't ruin the book.
my odd thomas feelings come from the end of the novel. and i just need to commiserate with someone.
i tried with my dad. here's how this went down.
i walked into the kitchen yesterday. i was about two thirds of the way done with the book for who knows how many times, and i sit on the kitchen counter.
me: i'm having odd thomas feelings!
my father:
me: i just want him to be happy. why can't he just be happy?
my father:
me: and now i'm even more upset because they delayed the movie release! NOW I HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL 2013!
my father:
me: and the movie is DONE! it's COMPLETED! gahhh i can't handle this!
my father:
me: i'm just going to go finish the book and cry.
pretty much.
right. it's awkward for me to type feelings. i want to type feels instead.
I HAVE ODD THOMAS FEELS, GUYS. I JUST DO.
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| i can't even look at this without having feels. |
odd thomas is a twenty year old fry cook. he lives above a garage. he's very simple, and only wears jeans and white t-shirts. he has a great, quirky sense of humor, and calls just about anyone he meets "sir" or "ma'am". he has a bad childhood but doesn't really talk about it. he sees the hope and light in humanity. he only uses peach scented shampoo, has a very reliable body clock, does not own a car, and can make the fluffiest pancakes in pico mundo, the desert town where he lives. his soul mate is an ice cream store manager named stormy, and they're doing this unheard of thing called abstinence. they like to eat tacos together in the belfry of a church. he's spooked by guns.
odd thomas can also see dead people.
you know, sixth sense i see dead people bit.
odd thomas's lines on this: "the dead don't talk. i don't know why." "i see dead people, but by god, i do something about it."
this, as he says, results in an unusual amount of laundry.
this isn't like the ghost whisperer, i swear to god. but when he sees dead people and they try to communicate with him, he tries to help them move on to the other side. normally this means he catches the person that killed them. or he gives them nice moral pep talks about how awesome the other side is. that can work sometimes.
i don't mean he like, runs around like the BAU in criminal minds. odd has never set foot outside of pico mundo. he probably never will. but remember yesterday when i talked about him wrestling harlo landerson?
that's about as personal as he gets, duking it out in a pool, trying to catch a killer.
most of the time he just consults with the police chief, wyatt porter, who's like a father figure.
so odd is twenty. when i first read odd thomas, i was sixteen, and i could not get enough of it. luckily for me, there are three other books (forever odd, brother odd, odd hours) and three more are coming. but i reread odd thomas over and over and over because there was just something about odd that i could not shake.
every person that i've met that has read this book has fallen hopelessly in love with odd. he's a great hero. he's a tragic hero.
i think i just really like his outlook on humanity.
seeing the dead can't be an easy thing to deal with. sometimes it's fun. the ghost of elvis presley follows him around and practically lives with him. but then there are people like penny kallisto who come to him after being raped and strangled, and they want justice. and he can give it to them.
again, odd is twenty. i'm twenty-one at this moment, and when i reread odd thomas when i was twenty, i just kept thinking about how we were the same age. and thinking, even though odd thomas has never left his home, has never seen the world, has never done all of these things, he is so much older and wordlier than i'll ever be.
odd thomas has the soul of a ninety year old saint, i swear to god.
until stormy comes around. you can't expect an abstinent twenty year old to not have bad thoughts.
most of my odd thomas feels come from odd's childhood, and i don't want to reveal too much, because you're obviously going to go read the book after this post. there's a reason that odd's spooked by guns, and there's a reason he doesn't talk about it.
there's a reason he's lived on his own since he was sixteen and that he has surrogate parents.
there's also a reason that when he was sixteen he was dumped into malo suerte lake chained to two dead men, but we don't get that explanation.
we also never figure out why he ended up chained in a meat locker with a japanese contortionist, caught by evil men in porkpie hats.
i love odd most when he mentions weird things like this, odd things that have happened to him. we never get any explanation. he just kind of throws that in there and you're left thinking, jesus, odd, how on earth did you get into that situation?
and of course, his name is odd.
his parents claim that it was supposed to be "todd" or "dobb", but they've just always called him odd. and it's on his birth certificate. the best part is he doesn't mind it.
odd doesn't complain about much. except people being offended by alliteration, because he loves alliteration.
"a flipped fork flicked my forehead."
it's so hard to blog about my feels for odd thomas. odd thomas has been my favorite book for nearly five years. i love everything about it. i'm drawn to odd. i feel for him, i feel with him, and i'm just doing a terrible job of trying to describe this without ruining the entire thing for you.
in short, I JUST WANT ODD THOMAS TO BE HAPPY.
i don't think he ever will be. we'll see what the next three books bring. they give me hope that he won't die.
this is a big achievement.
last night i finished the book, and even though i've read it a good thirty times, i just cried and cried. odd thomas just makes me bawl my eyes out. he's so incredibly human and i just can't stand it.
i'm also having feels because they're making an odd thomas movie. seriously.
i'm terrified.
odd thomas is the perfect simple complex character. he is the most perfect human in the fact that he is human, if that makes ANY sense whatsoever, and they decided that they can just make this into a movie?
the only person that can play odd thomas in a movie is odd thomas, and the last time i checked, odd thomas is a fictional book character that i'm madly in love with.
so i get on IMDB and the project is underway, and odd thomas is being played by anton yelchin.
i've seen anton yelchin twice: star trek and an episode of criminal minds. i don't know about him. mostly because he just physically doesn't look at all the way that i pictured odd, even though we never get a description of him at all. odd thomas is a first person perspective, and not once does he describe himself, and not once does another character physically describe him.
but anton yelchin just felt wrong.
willem dafoe as chief porter i can see. stormy i've never heard of. the same with odd's mother. but whoever plays her, she has to be perfect. she's an extremely minor character but she shapes odd's life and moral compass more than any other person in the novel.
i have to remind myself that dean koontz (the author) wrote the screenplay, and he's happy with the movie. the movie is completed, and he's happy with it. he says that he has "found the perfect odd thomas" in anton yelchin.
say slowly and repeat until you believe it: dean koontz is happy with the movie. dean koontz is happy with the movie.
i want this entire movie to unravel and never be made. you just cannot turn my favorite book into a movie.
odd thomas is a book character. he is the best book character on the face of the planet. he needs to remain a book character.
ONLY ODD THOMAS IS ODD THOMAS, OKAY.
when this movie finally comes out, i will go see it. i will dread it. i will be an absolute wreck.
and if the movie is any good, i will cry myself to sleep. like i did last night. becaue i just love odd thomas that much.
and god, i just want him to be happy, if he can ever be happy. that's all i want for him.
i'm not really sure how to end this. i'm just having odd thomas feels. and i kind of sort not but tried to blog about it.
i will say that when i was sixteen and i had odd thomas in hardback (my version is paperback) i walked a mile with it on my head. secret talent?
and i'll leave you with a great odd thomas quote.
“More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.”
i also like this one.
“Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.”
the cow explosion really was upsetting.
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