Hi :)
Сегодня хочу предложить вашему вниманию очередную историю на английском для тех, кто интересуется его изучением. Подойдет для уровней Intermediate и выше. Как всегда, историю можно прослушать в проигрывателе (смотри ниже). Для удобства текст приведен в конце статьи.
Составлено и начитано by white_kiwi.
Non-zombie (a boy's story)
Peter first came to identify himself as what he would later call non-zombie when he was 14. This is when he started noticing strange things around him. Distinct patterns. It occurred to him that everyone around him behaved in a similar way and he could swear that sometimes he could tell what people would do next.
It started when Peter realized that he is not interested in what other people were doing. He tried to socialize with his peers but no matter how hard he tried he could not understand their jokes, their pranks, their interests in life.
When he became 18 he came to the conclusion that everybody around him had only one goal in life – money and fame – Youtube bloggers, Instagrammers and all sorts of narcissists. Peter was not into that, he wanted to explore more of himself, to try to understand what he really wanted from life. Naturally he turned his attention to books. Harry Potter and other escapism books were fun, but were simple time-killers for Peter. This is when his highschool teacher recommended a more serious read – Kurt Vonnegut.
When Peter read his Breakfast of Champions he was stunned. In the book the main hero comes to realization that his fellow Americans were like machines, preprogrammed to do only specific things without ever deviating from what is considered the norm. In the book they were compared to robots.
Yes – though Peter. That’s what I was thinking too. This is when he adopted the terms zombie for people who think and act in a unified fashion and non-zombie – for independent thinkers like him.
And where do these independent thinkers congregate? In private chatrooms, of course. Soon Peter found one that looked very promising – Wake tfu. It was a group of people who expressed the same frustration as Peter did – the world is not perfect, modern ideals are a lie etc. There were some violent comments, too. But for Peter it was a place to air his frustration. He liked his new non-zombie community.
One day Peter was surfing the internet when he saw a news report. It was from 2 days before. Apparently some crazy person had carried a gun to school but was caught before he could injure anybody. Peter instinctively clicked on the video in the news report. In it the police were escorting a young man in what looked like military tactical gear out of the school building. When Peter saw the young man’s face his heart plummeted to his stomach. It was the guy from one of the avatars in the chatroom. He was so shocked he could not breathe.
At that very moment his mother came into the room. She looked very worried:
- Honey, there are some policemen downstairs. They wanted to speak with you about some private chatroom.