birth of a detective — part 1

The question I get asked the most on Twitter (and Formspring) is: Are those your own tweets? Hence, I had to change my profile bio to its current state, emphasizing that I’m not possessed by the devil and whatnot.

And what a wonderful topic to explore on my first post. But this isn’t about the profile, or the question. It’s about the tweets themselves, a dissection of the brainwork behind them. I don’t think it’s fair to summarize the process into one or two (or even thousands of) steps. But I do want to tell a story. Why not?

By the time I was in Grade 6, around 11 years old, I had read quite an impressive number of books. That number is 0. Ok, maybe impressive in a negative way. And not counting schoolbooks, of course. I had not read a book outside of the curriculum, and, if my life had gone on the way I wanted, I would have probably continued to not read a book. Why read when I’ve got the TV to keep me entertained.

But in Grade 6, I ran into that inevitable moment when someone’s life takes a turn for its fate.

I bought a book, with as much intention to read it as I had intentions to jump off a building. I bought it because I was at the Book Fair and my friends had bought books and I didn’t want to feel left out.

What did I buy, then? I bought what the spare change in my pocket could afford me. A $4 book. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. The book that sat on my shelf for months before I, out of boredom, opened it and changed my life.

Mr. Sherlock Holmes immediately forced himself onto my childish imagination, and set himself as my hero. His observational skills, his attention to details everyone would miss, his ability to put various insights together to form a logical sequence of events…all this impressed 11-year-old me. His cold and calculating persona was mysterious to me, and I immediately decided on what I wanted to be when I grow up.

I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes.

Of course, let’s not fool ourselves. I became no such person. In fact, I don’t think I even grew up beyond the 11-year-old version of me. But Mr. Holmes did shape me in ways that only he could be thanked for.

Come back tomorrow for part 2, where I try to explain what it is that Mr. Holmes did to my life. :)

PS: Since that age, I have done some serious catching up on my reading. Like, totally, yeah! (The voice in your head should read that last line with some kind of surfer accent)