Power in Weakness

I've been a book lover since as early as I can remember.  In third grade I was chided by my parents for reading Frank Peretti's supernatural thriller, This Present Darkness , a near 400 page fiction book, because of the nightmares it was causing.  This warning, however, hardly stopped me.  I went on to read the sequel, equally as long, and the next book he had written as well, The Prophet , all in the course of a few weeks.  Sometimes my hunger for literature would fix upon unusual selections, like the ones above, and other times on adolescent favorites, like the My Teacher Is An Alien series, or Roald Dahl's Matilda .  No matter the particular book in view, I vividly remember coming home from school only to plop down on my bed at 3:30 and devour page after page until dinner time, and sometimes until bedtime.  (Nobody told me that this was nerdy behavior; it was simply what I loved, and my social status at private school didn't seem to be affected by it.)...

Like any good 90's kid, I grew up adoring Jim Carrey.  I still remember watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective for the first time.  I was on my living room floor at about 11 years old, watching wide eyed as Carrey's face distorted to almost-inhuman degrees in comical expressions and, just as frequently, altered his voice for increased effect.  I was laughing so hard I almost peed.  I was addicted. I followed him carefully for years, sometimes disappointed by his more childish roles (at least in my "mature" adolescent estimation) such as in The Mask , but more often impressed by "classics" such as Dumb and Dumber , Liar Liar , and The Truman Show .  (I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed by this, but I still spontaneously quote lines from Dumb and Dumber , and if any of my fellow 90's childhood companions are present they invariably laugh or chime in with their own beloved quotes.)  As I got older, Carrey's roles got more complicated, and less fr...