Black Friday

So, we didn't go shopping today, thank goodness. We did hang around the house all day and study. Well, actually I played games and finished a mediocre book I started last summer. Then I finally studied.

The thing is, I haven't really had a lot of opportunities to read for fun. I miss it immensely. When I was in undergrad, I was working 2+ jobs, taking a full course load, and always volunteering or something. I was far too busy for recreational reading. In the summers I would usually just work and volunteer, and spend my evenings alternatively hanging out with friends and reading my heart out. One summer I remember I read 63 books. Most of them were young adult fiction, but they were all my old favorites. It felt like eating an entire bag of peanut butter cups or something equally guilty but great. But that you know you will regret later.

But this past summer, I admit that I didn't get a lot of reading in. First of all, I really wanted to read more non-fiction. I got a healthy start on Zinn's People's History of the United States (which I highly recommend...it is fascinating and well written and includes all the dirty history that they keep out of classroom textbooks), but I am always much slower at reading non-fiction than fiction. I just love getting swept up in a good story, and in fact I find it takes more work to stop reading a good story than it does to just continue reading. So I churn through that kind of stuff pretty fast. But, while non-fiction is interesting and I am lucky enough to usually learn just by reading, it's hard to get carried away in the same manner.

On top of the non-fiction, I also worked a pretty intense full-time job (instead of one or two part-time jobs), and I pretty much spent every weekend adventuring, and every night going out with my favorite peoples. So, in fact, I spent a lot of time putting reading for fun at a lower level of priority. And now I read approximately 300-400 pages of non-fiction, theoretical or research stuff for class each week. So while I read all the time, and I am getting better at reading non-fiction, it's been a bit of a killjoy.

But I have been working very hard so I decided to take it easy the beginning of this week pretty much through today. I did the work for class, but very little extra research outside of that. I cleaned as best I could, and didn't worry about the rest. And Kristen and I cooked Thanksgiving dinner together. So it somehow seemed appropriate to let myself finish the last 300 pages of that book that I had been working on. And parts of it were awful but parts of it were very good, so overall, I'm just going to enjoy that I got to read it. And then I will let myself slowly sink back into academic reading for grad school. I can feel the urgency in the back of my mind, but not in my heart or in my gut. Instead, I will spread out working on my three final papers. I will not leave them until the last weekend, nor panic. I will do the best I can to get a first draft done of each in the next week and then spend the week after that reviewing it, improving it, adding to it, and otherwise working my butt off.

And on December 17th, after my last final gets out at 4, I will rush across town to JFK and fly to Chicago with a giant suitcase full of gifts for the family and friends and dirty laundry to wash at the house of someone who owns a washing machine (Dad?!). Why yes I am trying to save $11 by being vastly inconvenient. I can't wait to see you all in less than a month!