#194 - reading, maddening, and twilight

could having my computer i the shop actually be a good thing? today is day 16 (business day 16, as in "your computer will take 14-30 business days for us to fix because you paid $459 for the extended warranty instead of saving that money and just taking it to a repair shop for way cheaper") of me not having my computer. i thought it might free up my time to do other things, and i have, but i can't seem to fit those other things nicely into my days because i've been having to cut out yoga and going to the gym and sleeping lately. still, new things are good too, if not entirely uncomfortable-making. for instance, going out with new people and being in semi-uncomfortable situations because of it has been a weird experience, but enlivening if anything, so i'm not complaining.

one thing i did want to try was reading. without knowing too much about the pop culture behind it, i decided to read twilight. my co-worker (she's 42) had read it and liked it enough to continue reading the rest of the series and even though i didn't give the upcoming movie much cred i was somehow intrigued. anyway, it was just coincidence the kristen mentioned it to me and asked if i wanted to borrow her copy so i felt like i couldn't resist the confluence of events telling me to read it right? so i borrowed it but after a week or so still hadn't opened the cover. i really was planning to read it... and i had lots of time because i had no computer (although i was desperately trying to finish those snapfish photo books and calendars before the deadline for christmas presents... by the way, they are magnificent), but for some reason i couldn't bring myself to start reading.

i have a weird relationship with reading. i think reading is absurdly boring. it takes entirely too much time to get anything accomplished with most writers because they are so overly verbose that each room they walk into must be painfully detailed before any action is allowed to occur. well, i think my view on reading is slightly slanted because most of the read that i've had to do came with time constraints. when i was young i read for book-it (that means 5 100-page books within a month for your free personal pan pizza... yum!), then in intermediate and high school it was "read this enormously long book then answer an equally enormous set of infuriatingly redundant questions about it."

well... i cheated in elementary school. i read flintstones books that were 100 pages long, but had pictures on the left-hand side of each page and text only on the right-hand side. i read the first and last page of each chapter. i doubled up on books i had read before. the only three books i truly read completely were call of the wild, white fang, and where the red fern grows, which i (of course) used multiple times throughout elementary school to get my free pizza.

i cheated in high school as well. cliffs notes were great, but even those were too long and tedious to read all the way through. i kept my eyes down during class discussions and waited for the assignment on each book before hunting through the pages for keywords about passages i really needed to read. i only read the first 16 or so pages of david copperfield and practically none of the invisible man. plays were quick reads so i did those, but the only true novels i read the whole way through was... come to think of it, i can't even name a single one. i guess i was good at bs-ing my assignments because i still did fairly well in class, not that an ocassional "c" didn't pop up when i really couldn't flub my way out of something, but i think the thing i learned most from my honors and ap classes was how to give teachers exactly what they wanted... and i was good at it.

which is why i also didn't read in college. of course, most of the reading there was through textbooks, which i enjoyed SO much more than novels. i could actually read through chapters and chapters of textbook at a time, sitting on the tiny lanai on the dormroom floor with earphones on (instrumentals only, anything with words got me too distracted), i actually enjoyed the experience. a weird thing happened in the two english courses i took in college though... i actually read the books. probably because i had ample time, classes weren't hard and since i knew how to give teachers what they wanted, any class outside of my subject area was strictly limited to "sit in class, decide what's important, remember to write that on the test, and don't pay attention to whatever other crap they're spouting" which i got very good at.

anyway, i took american literature and women writers in america (or something like that, i needed a writing intensive course and it fit in my schedule, plus nicole took it with me). the american lit course was profoundly dull, the syllabus included the cannon of american literature, which, although it was of absolutely no interest to me, was good for the course, i mean, if you say you took an american lit course and don't know who huck finn is then people would tell you you had a crappy teacher right? but since i had so much time, i actually read all the books, most of them for the first time, even though i was already assigned most of them in high school (and looking back on my papers from high school, i have no idea why i got "a's" on most of them because i was writing crap, convicing crap, but still crap unrelated completely to the actual reading). so that was insightful (for a completely different reason than what my prof had in mind i'm sure) for me. but that other women's lit class, oh boy, my head still spins a bit from reading some of that ultra-feminist garbage. i mean, out of 5 or 6 books that we read, i can say that i was truly disturbed by at least 4 of them, not because of any graphic female issues, but of the sheer ferocity of some of the writing... if you want to know what i mean, just look up the book project girl or something written by nora okja-keller... seriously some messed up snip...

still, for that class i read every single word in every single book and i liked the class discussions that we had after it (mostly because i found each book so disturbing that i was genuinely relieved to talk about it afterward). that was the last time i actually read a real book. maybe about 4 years ago i went to a book fair about picked up two books that i planned to read... but i only got through about 100 pages in one (shadows of forgotten ancestors by carl sagan, a book i was actually truly interested in) and never started the second one (the search for superstrings, symmetry, and the theory of everything, probably already outdated by new ideas in physics). i just couldn't bring myself to partake in such a slow and tedious hobby.

well, if you're still reading this post then you must be laughing to yourself at the irony of this post being so long and tedious to read, i'm sure. but i'm nearing my point...

so i still hadn't opened twilight after a week or two and loaned it to another friend to read instead. but my co-worker overheard that i loaned it out and she lent me her own copy to read instead, so i told myself again that i WOULD read this book. even though i wasn't that interested in seeing the movie, i figured that i could buy into the hype if i at least had read the book and had something to compare it to (or something familiar to draw from to make the movie more interesting if i ever saw it). but after a few days i still hadn't taken a peek at it.

then something different happened. i'd say my work year had been going on pretty well up until monday, that's when i was blindsided (as people in my field of work often are) by a parent and an "advocate" about services that i (and my co-workers) provide. now i believe that i can handle myself very well in most of these situations because i have strong and justifiable convictions, but after the first hour of debates it became very apparent that logic and reason would hold no sway and i was at the mercy of the power play. which i hate. without being too specific, the argument smoldered for about 30 minutes, then became red hot when they realized that i would hold to my convictions against the power play. now, i know how to be a team player and i'm always trying to self-monitor so that the strength i have in my convictions does not become merely stubborness, but in this instance (with the way they were attacking and antagonizing to build their power) i became absolutely livid. my hands were shaking, my breath became cold, i could feel my core temperature drop and my arm and chest muscles were convulsing and spasming. it's not like in the cartoons when you see someone's eyes boil red and fumes spurt out their ears, no, that happens when you're frustrated. this was an internal maddening. my chest felt like an icebox, i was shivering, i had taken off my jacket because it was already afternoon and it was hot and humid but my biceps were shuddering from the cold i thought i felt. i couldn't remember feeling as mad as i was for such a prolonged period of time. i can easily remember flashes of temper, like when someone cuts me off in traffic, or frustration from a client driving me up the wall, but never a sustained fury like i felt in that meeting.

my co-workers said that i handled myself very well, and that even though they could sense i was upset, that i put across my message in a professional manner (even though it fell on deaf ears and the power play still won the day). immediately after the meeting i was a little nervous that i had shown too much anger or conducted myself according to my emotions and not my professional judgment, but the next day we had a post-meeting debriefing and my fears were alleviated. still, that night after the meeting i was in a daze. i couldn't believe the type of anger that had arisen in me that afternoon, i didn't know i was capable of it. but wherever it came from, it was very useful, i mean, even though i was seething in the inside, i kept my composure and used that anger to ensure that my message was being delivered efficiently and soundly (even though those who were meant to be listening did not respect it). it was not detrimental to the process, rather added conviction to my proposals in a way that was not threatening, but convincing.

in any case, that night after the meeting (before i had talked again with my co-workers who set my thoughts at ease) i felt strangely calm. of course, i was still mad as mushrooms about what had transpired and how it had transpired, but i was thinking clearly, i was confused and questioning myself, but i was certain about those questions. i don't know, it was a kind of clarity that even though i don't know the answers to my questions, i know exactly what kind of questions to ask and who to ask them to, like i could interview myself and construct a perfect picture of myself with the information collected. it was in those instances of clarity that i decided to finally read twilight.

as i started reading, all i really wanted was some kind of engrossing storyline to take me into the book for a little while. it was late by the time i started reading, about 10:30, and even though that's the time i've been striving for (unsuccessfully, recently) to get my full 8-hours of sleep, i said "screw it" and started reading. first thing i noticed was how easily and quickly the pages were going by. the writing was not so verbose, not every detail of the surroundings needed to be pinpointly illustrated (e.g. "the faint lines falling through the wicker stool met the brightly lit pastel cushion sitting at the top of the wooden legs in the room painted purple with three doves sitting beneath the blah blah blah"). dialogue flowed whenever it was present (none of that "he said... then she said... as he exclaimed... while she remarked...") and disappeared into the background when it was not needed. i think it was the absence of dialogue that caught my attention first... in a movie, you can't film a scene of a girl walking into a high school cafeteria without picking up the ambient extra-talk around her, but in a book you can let the prattering fall away, like when Bella is walking between classes at school, the author mentions the tone and purpose of the conversation she has with her friends without having to script all those additional lines of dialogue. i know that's a pretty simple device, but what a difference it makes.

so i ended up reading until i was really ready to stop, which was i think two chapters, i needed sleep anyway, but i was very satified with what i had read, and also with the fact that i can continue the rest of the reading at my leisure, and for my own pleasure. it was a pretty good feeling. i liked the characters in the story, and i like how events played out, i could imagine a movie while i was reading (i'm sure not the movie that was actually made, because i can see a lot going wrong in the translation from book to movie) but i was glad to be reading it instead of watching the movie (of course, i probably will go see the movie, just to see it, and compare). but i think the thing i liked best about reading twilight was the calmness and the clarity that it seem to bring to my mood. i don't know if it's just the act of reading or the storyline or the characters but i get a clarity to my thoughts and a perspective that i like. i happens every once in awhile, i'll see certain movie or read a newspaper article or hear a song on the radio, but it seems to happen everytime i pick up this book. so... i'm gonna keep reading this book. right now i'm about 1/3rd of the way through and so far i like the writing (although this author does seem to have a slightly annoying propensity for color descriptions) and the characters and i'm glad i've at least seen previews for the movie because it's nicer to be able to put a face to a blank name (otherwise i stop reading names and just see words, but when you have a face to attach to the name that gives it a meaning rather than just a bunch of letters you see together in the same order all the time) but i won't be looking up anything else on the movie because i can't stand movie trailers than let you see parts from throughout the entire movie (sidenote: i think all movie trailers should just be the actual first 2 minutes of the movie... no separate narration, make the storyline grab the viewer from the beginning).

in conclusion:
- if you read all of that, wow, you're a better man/woman than i
- reading is probably a good hobby, but i'm still very picky about my reading material and intensely selective about which books i choose to devote my time and effort into
- anger and fury can be harnessed for good
- i am not a teenage girl just because i like to read twilight