inside her skull

Yes, I'm still listening to 'Needle Through A Bug'. It's just good.

A collection of random musings; I'll warn you now, there are spoilers for some literary works ahead.

I was talking about the Chronicles of Narnia with a friend, and she said she ahted them, because Susan didn't arrive in Heaven at the end of The Last Battle. She thought that Lewis implied that being a silly teenage girl means you go to Purgatory/Hell/whatever. It seems that several people were similarly distraught at this point. I don't understand that reasoning. It's always been simple to mean--the reason Susan didn't appear in Heaven at the end of The Last Battle was simply because she wasn't dead.

Arguably one could get up in arms about the fact that she didn't go to Narnia, either--but Diggory, Polly, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy only showed up in Narnia because they were dead. They died in a train crash, which also killed the Pevensie's parents. Jill and Eustace were also dead when they met them, having been killed at some point in the battle, or possibly the ensuing apocalypse. Susan was not dead, so she didn't appear.

Besides, why would they bring up that 'Once a King or Queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen in Narnia' refrain so often if Susan got booted out for being a teenager?

On to Shakespear. The titular characters of Romeo And Juliet are not the ideal of a couple in love, and were never intended to be so. The fact that so many people hold them up as a golden standard of love... actually explains a lot about why dating and marriage is kind of screwed up nowadays. Romeo and Juliet were fourteen and thirteen, respectively, and were basically morons. The bit Shakespeare actually wanted people to take in was the Friar's 'Love to moderation' speech at the wedding--but most modern performances cut that scene because it's such an unromantic thing to say at a wedding.

It also makes Edward and Bella from Twilight by Stephanie Meyer being compared to Romeo and Juliet frickin' hilarious, though.