Time Spent Reading Versus Time Spent Speaking

It seems like people either read a lot or people talk a lot. If we're lucky, we do both in equal measure. I think people can spend long portions of their life reading and typing, or reading and having that one long conversation with that one friend every week or month or so, but people who read a lot need a lot of alone time to accomplish all of that reading. On the one foot, the more we read, the more we might have to say. On the other foot, the more we do, see, converse, trip, fall, break our bones, the more stories we might have to tell. The stories of our minds and their tangentially abstract adventures are kept in books, but are not as astounding, and frequently harder to convey the humor of, to most folks at social gatherings. Except for those rare social gatherings that are intended for the academics or the theoreticians or the philosophers.

I live within this unending equation. To read? To speak? To live? To reflect? To experience physically? To experience mentally? What does it mean to experience mentally? Can you live after dwelling in a mental moment? Can you reflect on reflection? All of those books that wait for me. That I will one day wade through, or not wade through. That I will pick up and carry around and hope to one day live through.

Those that read to escape. Those that reject reality. I guess I have chosen to reject reality through action, through imagination, through music mostly. Less through words. Words are tied to deadlines. Like so many, school has killed my love of reading for imagination's sake. Will it be resurrected soon?

Will I stay with music and film and forget about the beauty and transportation of words that are bound in thick books?

Have You Been To The Woods Recently?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Ralph "Where is Waldo" Emerson, Walden

Temporary Time Temp

temping is awesome!
i love filing stuff!
i love heavy paper folders and paper cuts!
i love time cards!
i love people with horrible breath, who talk softly!
i love getting up early!
i love getting home tired!
i love bending over a file cabinet!
i love listening to i-pod headphones so much that my inner ear hurts!
i love pretending to not be online!
i love writing emails to everyone i can think of!
i love checking my email obsessively!
i love looking at the clock!
i love looking at the clock fifteen minutes later!
i love going to use the men's room and keeping my ipod headphones on!
i love living vicariously through the lyrics that i hear!
i love waiting for 530pm!
i love work!
i love having such an amazing work ethic!
i love meaningless tasks!
i love the fact that someday i'll be a teacher!

and all of the tasks that i complete will be
oh so meaningful!

just bursting with meaning!

i love all of it!
i can't get enough of it!
it smacks me in the face!
and i beg for more!
more!
more!


a little more!



ah, friday!