Looking for love in all the wrong places

It’s been no secret that Charlie likes Sam in a way that goes beyond friendship even though she has told him that they could never be a ‘couple’. That makes it even harder for Charlie as he begins to mature and truly feel the pains of wanting Sam in his life as more than just a friend. Before Thanksgiving, Sam begins to see a guy named Craig who is much older than him and even older than Sam. Charlie thinks the guy must be 21 because he drinks a lot. Charlie explains that Sam met Craig while playing in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and that Craig is actually a nice guy, but different. In a bit of selfish regret, Charlie wishes that Sam would break up with Craig but it’s hard to tell if it s because he is falling in love with her or because he wants to protect her. This idea comes from the one description of Craig that makes Charlie not like him: Craig’s sense of what love and beauty are.
Craig takes pictures and he is really good at it. But when he takes pictures of Sam, he never sees that the pictures are beautiful because Sam is in them, he sees them as beautiful because he took them. He thinks that it so the wrong kind of love that Craig expresses and that Sam misinterprets, but he doesn’t want to butt in. Instead, he hopes that one day he can take a picture of Sam to show her how beautiful she is regardless of how the picture comes out. By the end of the entry, Charlie realizes, through a conversation with his sister, that love has a way of making people blind. His sister secretly dates a guy that their father disapproves of because he has a temper and hit her, but she continues to overlook that and sees the guy anyway. In the end, Charlie sort of understands, but overall, he finds that because of their situations, he cares about each of them even more.