Wouldn’t It Be Nice

I do not feel like writing today.

I don’t want to get into it, but it’s been an eventful weekend. And I don’t really have it in me to be witty or creative or whatever it is I am when I write these posts every week.

But, small win: I am officially in the habit of writing every week so to just skip it because I’m not in the mood feels wrong.

That being said, fact is I still don’t really have much to say. But I will say this:

I read this book called Unbirthday by Liz Braswell. It is one of the Disney Twisted Tales series. This one is a twisted tale about Alice of Alice in Wonderland. My cousin gave me this book for Christmas because it was one of her favorite books that she read last year. This alone is enough to make me love the book: just the fact that my cousin gave it to me. I adore my cousins. Any one of them could give me a bag of feces and I would be like, “This is the greatest bag of feces I have ever received and I am better for having been given this bag of poop.” (Thankfully none of them are the type to pass around poop bags, but still, I’m just saying that is how much I love them.)

But anyway, I got this book and immediately decided I needed to refresh my memory of the Alice in Wonderland movie. So I hopped on Disney Plus and watched the original animated movie. Then for good measure I watched the live action movie too. And then I read the book.

Here is what I love about the movies, but especially about the book: in Wonderland, things often make no sense. Utter nonsense occurs left and right and the characters just get on with it, continue onward without pausing to try to decipher what happened. Sure, sometimes Alice analyzes and tries to make sense of things, but for the most part she just accepts that this is Wonderland and that’s the way it is.

Normally when I’m reading if I bump up against something that confuses me or is nonsensical, I flip back a few pages, re-read some stuff, and try to figure it out. Not so with Unbirthday. With this book I just accepted the words on the page and stopped questioning things that happened. I could believe it all because - it’s Wonderland! How delightful to be so released from trying to make everything make sense.

So the thing I want to say is this: wouldn’t it be nice to be able to turn off one’s brain and stop analyzing everything? Sure, I’m an overthinker, so probably this annoys me more than it would the average person, but I imagine that most people find themselves at a point where they’d like to not have to think anymore. Something happens in real life and instead of just accepting and moving on we have to process, figure out how we feel about it, think about what we could have done differently, plan for how we will handle it next time. I tell you it is exhausting to be a human. Thinking thoughts in the real world can be a real drag. It makes one long for Wonderland and the freedom to just accept things as they are and move on.

It’s not that way. We are stuck with thinking, and that is probably for the better. But wouldn’t it be nice every once in a while to pay a little visit to Wonderland?