My many personalities.

I went up to Boston this weekend to pay a friend a much needed visit. I decided to drive for some nice scenery, and so that I could stick it to those bastards at Delta Airlines for all the indecencies they had treated me to. On the way up, I couldn't help but feel like every aspect of Massachusetts was designed with pissing me off in mind. The street signs seemed to be run by some sort of volunteer organization that deemed it unnecessary to label 90% of the streets in Brookline. When I arrived, we centered around the TV in his living room, me with my beer and him with his club soda, we caught up on small talk. I was happy to see him but was also uneasy. The original label on my bottle was frayed and tattered while my hands disposed of the nervous energy I had building up with each passing exchange. I didn't want to ignore the elephant in the room, but I wanted my friend to know that it was his old friend had come to visit and not his new therapist.

You visit your friend in Boston. Counter intuitively, you decide renting a car is the cheapest option since your brother works at enterprise and your friend can't provide any transportation on his own. When you arrive, greet your friend as if you saw him yesterday. Accept the beer he offers you in spite of knowing that he abstains from drinking. Ignore the grim context of your visit. Make sure he knows that you are not there simply due to recent events, but also to see a friend that enjoys his company. Hope that he will it up on his own, when he is ready to talk about it.

Thanks to his connections with a rental company, Brian decided it would be best to drive up to Boston to see his friend. When he finally arrived, Brian and his friend exchanged greetings and took up positions in the living room. He opted not to refuse his friends offer of a beer, hoping for it to serve as a symbol that recent events had not redefined anything between his friend and him. They both sported a melancholy chagrin as they exchanged updates, sorting through an index of memories they both knew the other would have found entertaining. As the conversation progressed, Brian felt the humming of the TV in the background encroaching on his words, drowning them as he struggled to sustain the small talk. His visit was routine in timing, but recent events necessitated an awkward shift in their conversation.

***
While I could have mockingly kept the bulk of my paragraphs the same, simply replacing only the pronouns and nouns applicable to perspective, I felt that doing so would not make the samples realistic ones. In the first person, I feel more inclined to focus on abstract and cognitive details. I feel the first person lends the ability to note internal thoughts that rarely surface in spoken or written language. The second person was the most difficult for me, as I feel the perspective is reserved for "For Dummies" books and choose your own adventure novels. As I saw in last weeks short story, it can be used to set a specific tone and personality for the narrator, which had a lot of affect on the paragraph. The third person requires the most detail in my opinion. Its frame of reference seems to hold more distance between the reader and narrator. This change in the frame of reference is what I feel defines the changes in perspective. While the context is the same it changes the viewpoint that the reader approaches the reading from. With this, the author must adjust his delivery method accordingly.

Edit:
-Brian Walker