Connecting Through Words in The Beginning of Everything

I love words; I always have. In preparing to write this model blog entry for you, I took the books I recently finished, as well as the few I am reading now, and looked through my highlight section on my Kindle. I love words, especially someone else's words that say what I feel so much better than any way I could say it. Through all the looking, I kept coming back to this line:

"The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring" (66). 

I really enjoyed the novel The Beginning of Everything, by Robyn Schneider. Though at some points it got a little bit predictable, I really couldn't put it down. Ezra, the main character, has pulled away from his former "popular" friends in the aftermath of a car accident that left him unable to play sports. Your typical jock who finds he has nothing left; well, not really. Turns out Ezra may have only been "pretending" to be that high school cliche. Learning the hard way that his former friends may not have been actual friends, Ezra reconnects with his middle school best friend, Toby, and finds his inner academic nerd, as well (in the end) some people he can truly call friends. But before you go dissing the popular kids, enter Cassidy Thorpe-- mysterious, adventurous, intelligent (and gorgeous) Cassidy. But she's hiding a secret that keeps her always at a distance, and though she steals Ezra's heart, she ends up leaving it in pieces. I shouldn't write much more here other than "go out and read this book, ladies. It rocks!"

Several weeks ago I learned of a young woman, 29, named Brittany Maynard who was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma. She has chosen to control her own death-- not to commit suicide in the traditional sense, but in controlling when she will die, she is controlling the quality of her remaining time on earth. I think of that above quote when I think of her-- she spoke up. She didn't LET wording of laws betray her-- she spoke out and moved to a state, Oregon, which "allows legal protections for terminally ill patients who want to end their suffering" (Washington Post, 10/8/2014). You can find the article detailing her choice and reasoning if you click here. There are so many emotional and moral opinions surrounding her choice, but she stood up for herself; she took control of her own life and met death on her own terms (she died November 2).

I thought I'd give you an oldie but a goodie here with John Mayer and "Say".