There was this one summer when I was growing up, possibly the summer before 5th or 6th grade. My brother was obsessed with The Hunt for Red October for some reason. Every day he watched it. Every. Day. I would always wake up and groggily wander downstairs, and he’d be watching it first thing in the morning. So, since I suffer from the common little-sister syndrome of “Everything my brother thinks is cool is most definitely cool,” I would usually sit and watch with him.

He had the whole movie memorized, even the Russian parts, and I was about to get to that point, too. But you know, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure I had absolutely NO idea what was going on in that movie, at all.

It’s kind of like this terrible, wonderful compare-contrast paper I had to write for some English class, either high school or 8th grade, i can’t remember. It was one of those deals where you had to read so many novels over the schoolyear on your own, and then they made you write papers on them to make sure you’d really been reading them. I somehow managed to write a compare-contrast paper on Red Storm Rising and one of the Dragonlance novels, somehow convincing the world that one of the Red Storm characters (I forget which) and Tasslehoff Burfoot were more alike than they had any right to be. It was terribly forced and I was snickering the whole time I was writing it, but the teacher was enchanted and gave me an A (she’d probably never read either). I’m pretty sure that, even though I’d read it thoroughly, I had no idea what was going on in that book.

And now, as I take a break from playing Ghost Recon because it stresses me out too much because I can’t play one squad without worrying about the other and fearing that the computer is too stupid to handle them and is going to get them all killed and switch back and forth and back and forth and OH MY GOD A TANK…

…I wonder…WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME, TOM CLANCY???