Growing up I found stories really boring. Even though I had the ability to follow a plot and recall key details, I just didn’t find experiencing a story to be all that interesting. I would put off reading for my 4th grade reading log. When playing video games, I would skip dialogue and cut scenes, and I would read comic books without paying much attention to the dialogue. This is how I engaged (or rather didn’t engage) with stories until I was about 13.
In high school I started to enjoy stories differently than I did before. I watched TV shows for the plot, not just the action scenes. I noticed and enjoyed when my teachers would tell a story from their personal lives, but I’m not sure if I liked them for what they were trying to get across or because it meant that I could get a break from working. Another change happened around the time I started college.
So many college classes, in my experience, ask the students to interrogate their experiences and provide their own perspectives – certainly more so than in high school or before. This blog post is an example. With this self-interrogation I have been forced to think about my experiences in a way I haven’t before. At the same time, youth to early adulthood is a time for experiencing new things.
Now I regularly read not only manga and comic books that I started getting interested in, but I also love doing research (even if most of my research is prompted by online discussions that I get into). I have a newfound interest in stories and love to find interesting connections between events. Just recently I was talking to my sister about Miranda v. Arizona and how one of the guys responsible for killing Ernesto Miranda was let off after invoking his 5th amendment rights, the same rights that the Miranda decision required the cops read.
The image at the top contains Ernesto Miranda’s booking photos
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