Plot Lines and Crossed Lines

For the past two weeks, my AP lit class has been working with Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. One of the things my lit teacher said before we started was that Arcadia had six different plot lines but he only wanted us to pay attention to two. He also told us that Arcadia takes place in two different time periods, but everything happens in the same room. So as we are reading the two things we are supposed to keep track of gets pointed out to us and so goes the keeping track of things and such. Now, I love plot lines. Plot lines are the reason to watch or read anything (duh), but multiple plot lines, oh it's Christmas!

In Brave New World, chapter 3 had three different scenes going on at once and the way it was written was that it would have a clump from one thing and then jump to another and then jump to another and continue that way in no particular order. The clumps got progressively smaller until it was just a sentence or two from one thing before jumping. Reading chapter 3 of Brave New World was the most fun I've had with a book in a long time. Until Arcadia that is.

With Arcadia, I had fun figuring things out and keeping track of the events happening in the past and present. For whatever reason, keeping track of multiple plot lines comes somewhat easy to me. Do I get things mixed up, turned around, and crossed? Yes, I do sometimes more on that later. But the fact that my mind is able to keep up with things and switch to something else at the drop of a hat amazes me (Probably how I'm able to adjust the settings on my camera without much thought). Normally, my mental things like this stay in realm of lit and my entertainment, but recently a concept in econ put my plot line thing to use.

In econ, we recently (I say recently but it was two weeks ago) did game theory and worked with the matrix table thingy. The thing about game theory and such is that you have to pay attention to the details given and which things go with which player and what happens if one player does one thing. Multiple factors, multiple outcomes. Plot lines, that's all it is.

Now, the lines crossed thing. Sometimes I do get things mixed up or smush things together. I call it getting my lines crossed. When I'm actively working multiple things and I'm dealing with various casts of characters and their own plots, I sometimes have to stop and remember what I'm working on and what has already happened. Sometimes I have to reread something and refresh what I had happen. There have been moments when I've stopped and gone, "Wait, this happened? I thought it was this that and the other." Sometimes I'll smash two characters together and think they are one. I get lines crossed. It's inevitable. But sometimes my line crossing flows into other things. Today, I smushed two different types of graphs together into one in econ. Right type of market, but with the product and factor market graphs smushed together. *Shrugs* Meh, stranger things have happened.

So yeah, plot lines. Plot lines, plot lines, plot lines. Not sure if anything I just said made any sense, but if it did yay, winning at life. I might do a brain dump or another "Broadway and lit" thing (the last one I did like that was in October with The Tempest). For now, Sanders out.