A Road Less Travelled

I just read The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. For some reason I felt a great kinship with the main character. Yes, toward the end there are some annoying bits mostly in how the romantic interest is handled. No, the ending is quite as satisfying as the rest of the book. But overall I did enjoy it a lot. For one thing the heroine has a nasty cough for part of the book. I can see at once that this is the most natural thing in the world, and so very applicable to my life. Except that she got her cough from accidentally breathing in dragon flame while killing a dragon. It seems so much more heroic than the usual kind of cough which requires cleaning up after children who cough so hard they vomit and pausing from that to have a coughing fit myself. I suppose there could be something honorable about the second scenario as well. Right. Thanks anyway, but I’ll take the dragon fighting cough. Or would I? I realized for the first time that I’m nineteen and I have money in the bank. I could be anywhere I wanted to be right now. But I’m here and I don’t plan to leave. There’s a whole lot more to that than just the surface desicion to stick around for now. It comes to down to authority and submission and community–and yet on top of all that I just don’t want to be anywhere else right now. If I really wanted to be somewhere else I already would be. This comes as something of a shock to me. I’m here voluntarily coughing and cleaning up vomit. And somehow, this is actually a comforting thought.