Like Sand Through the Hourglass
My blog posts are starting to resemble rebel-party communiques, written in the dead of night by the feeble illumination of my computer screen, usually after writing a paper of some variety, grocery shopping (which got done at 9:30pm!) and finding a few spare moments to bust chops with the love of my life.
I just climbed into bed and ducked under the covers to read a few pages of “Dexter by Design” when Ed whimpered in his sleep “Did you do a blog post today?”
“Damn it!”
I slinked from beneath the sheets and dragged myself back out to my trusty computer to rattle off a few lines. I don’t really have anything to talk about, so I guess time crunches are my topic of the night. I just passed in an annotated bibliography for one of my courses, and got the shaking finger of disapproval from the electronic upload site because It was “Past the due date” at 12:09am. I emailed it to the teacher directly, with a few wise-cracks about burning the midnight oil to draw his keen eye away from my penchant for late-night cramfests.
So, in the spirit of cramming everything into my day at odd angles, like packing for a vacation at gunpoint… I realized today that with the schedule I keep (full-time job, two classes, writer, and an apparent addiction ot Na:::Whateverthehellitis:::Mo’s, (Nanowrimo, Nablopomo, Script Frenzy… I think I’m going to start “National Pie Baking Month” for June.. what do you think?) that I often have to choose between writing and reading because there just isn’t time. Even writing this post is guaranteeing I wake up a shattered wreck in the morning… my co-workers know that talking before coffee = death. They understand.
Which brings me to my latest way of jamming extra stuff into my life. For a while I’ve been doing most of my “reading” by audiobook. I listen to them in the car for the morning and evening commute, sitting in my car snarfing a sandwich at lunch. I actually listened to my current selection tonight while grocery shopping. How’s that for multitasking!
I get no small amount of teasing my audiobook love… Ed contents he doesn’t count it as reading… Beth calls it “Ristening”… I used to get a fare amount of well-intentioned jibed that I didn’t make time to sit down with an ACTUAL book, and not do any of the other things I have to do. I got a fair amount of crap for being an English student who has no time for anything but assigned books. So this year I decided “Hell, you know what? They’re right!” and made my new year’s resolution to read/listen to a book a week this year, no matter what I had to do to accomplish it. I love to read, but got away from it in my working years because there just isn’t enough time. I’m not one of these people who can read two pages at a time and be satisfied. I read “The DaVinci Code” in a single eight-hour sitting. During my job-hunt last year, I was at home one afternoon and cracked open “Love in the Time of Cholera”, finally looking up five hours later realizing I was getting hungry. I’m a marathoner when it comes to reading, so I hadn’t been making the time to do it. But that changed this year.
What got me back into reading in a big way, was writing my first novel in 2007. I wanted to be a better writer, and nothing will hone your skills by immersing yourself in the writing styles of lots of other authors. I started saying to hell with the dishes and the laundry while I was writing, and then editing, and now that’s sort of carrying over into my reading goals for the year. My house looks like it belongs to that flaky writer chick from the remake of “The Stepford Wives”, and my fridge varies between a black hole and a science experiment- but damn, I’m on my 20th book of the year, I am editing at lunch, reading in the bath, shopping at the end of the night, and blogging way the hell after my bedtime.
Some people know how to turn a dollar into two. I can turn an hour into three.
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