Stupefy!

Today in APUSH, I came to a huge realization. Not a realization about Harry Potter* (although the Black family is endlessly interesting, every adult we see in the series, except for maybe the Weaslys, is really messed up. And I do wish we knew more about Regulus**, and what Snape's boggart was. And what Snape saw in the Mirrior of Erised.) This realization is about books and my relationship to them.
I don't know anything about language. I know about plot, and I know about characters. I may not be able to write them, but I can understand them. I don't know anything aobut the simple parts, the very basics. I don't know anything at all. I've been reading for ten years, and I don't know anything about words.
I'm afraid, and rightly so.
How do you learn about that? I don't know anything about writing style, and I don't know what I should know about writing style. Do I have a style? For the only writing assignment I've done in English this year, the teacher said I had a strong voice. I was being horribly sarcastic in the assignment, and I thought I was going over the top. Does that mean that sarcasm is my style? Can that even be a style?
I feel like such a terrible writer at the moment. It is vaugely encouraging to know that the things I'm writing have been getting better. I came across a story that I wrote this time freshman year, and it was really bad. It was your general angsty-inesert-self-I-don't-know-how-to-make-a-real-character story. The characters kind of all blended together in my NaNo, but at least they weren't all exactly like me. Milton was kind of a platform for my rants***, but at least he was his own character with his own past. Ixente isn't anything like me, and I don't think Elliot is either. That means they're getting better, right?
On a completly different note, I went to crew today, and then I got home and thought "I'm really tired so I'm going to take a nap, then I'm going to go for a long walk because it's warm and sunny today and I want to spend some time outside." And then when I woke up, it was dark. No walk happened, and that makes me sad.
On another completly different note, that girl from my drawing class who believes that Norway is perfect just might be right.

*While we're on the detour of Harry Potter, which house do you think I belong in? Because I don't think I really would fit in any of them. Does that mean I'm a Hufflepuff? Because Hufflepuffs are a) loyal and b) particularly good finders, and I don't think I'm either of those. I used to think that I should be in Ravenclaw, but I don't think so anymore. And I'm not braver than average either, so that rules out Gryffindor. And Slytherin...I'm not sure if I would belong there either. I don't think I'm evil, but I understand the self-preservation idea. And then Jo answeared "He’s so good. You know, Snape is so amazing, was he truly meant to be in Slytherin, Snape?" with "Yes, God, yes, definitely, at the time that he was sorted. I believe what Dumbledore believes when he says to Snape in the very last book, “Sometimes I think we sort too soon.” To judge someone at the age of eleven, to judge them, to set their future course so young seems to me to be a very harsh thing to do. And it doesn’t take into account the fact that we do change and evolve. A lot of people are at forty what they were at eleven, having said that, so I think Sorting Hat is shrewd, but Snape does redeem himself and it fails to take that into account. But then again, you could turn that on his head and say, “But maybe, with these people being sorted into Slytherin, someone who has the capacity to change themselves might also have the capacity to change Slytherin.”" and that kind of makes me think about the world in a completly different way, because it makes it acceptable to realize that when I was eleven, I thought I would have been a Ravenclaw, but that's changed. I wonder, if I was around people who were supposed to be just like me, if I would have changed less. Or maybe, I would have changed more because I would have thought that the world had enough people who were like me.
**Did I tell you that he and Cygnus and Sirius and Scorpious and Orion and Arcturus were all on the MME? They were. It made my day a week ago.
***Hey, that reminds me of someone else...but I do think that was his opinion, not the writer's.