One of these days

Over and over, I am amazed with the abundance of fine people in my life. This week has been full of reminders that these connections with people are what save this crabby middle aged "antisocial misanthrope" (see last post) from an empty, sad and misspent life. It would be wonderful to be eloquent enough to tell people what their presence in my life has meant--but it seems that the words often fail or sound cliche.

I'm not a hugger, I'm not good at remembering birthdays or other special days, I'm not good at thoughtful gestures or gifts but:

"One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down
and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
And I'm gonna try
and thank them
for all the good times together
One of these days"
Neil Young

Am I a "Antisocial Misanthrope"?

In the April 20 issue of Newsweek there was an article, by Jennie Yabroff, about reading. Apparently, fiction reading is on the rise but there are some people, labelled in the article as the "self-appointed literary police" who are concerned that the fiction that people are reading is too easy, not good enough (in a literary sense) or too commercial. The article talks about the "gateway drug" theory of literature--"that once introduced to the pleasures of reading, a child (and maybe an adult) will work her way through increasingly difficult and, presumably, increasingly more edifying texts....implicit in this theory is the idea that at some point reading should stop being a pleasurable diversion and start being work."

I have to confess that I've been guilty of that kind of thinking. I have a good friend who reads nothing but romance novels. She reads one to two of them a week and I tease her mercilessly about it. Let me try to lay out the plot for you girl meets boy, they run into a bit of trouble but fall in love and live happily ever after--EVERY SINGLE TIME!!!! My sister and I love mysteries. And just like romance books, the plot is always the same. Someone gets killed, someone else figures out who did the killing and why.

My kids don't read as much as I always dreamed they would (this would be the same pre-natal dreams where they never talked back, kept their rooms clean, dressed in clothes I approved etc...). But when they do read I have to hold myself back from suggesting or being too opinionated about what they "should" read. Maybe they subscribe to Mikita Brottman's theory she put forward in "The Solitary Vice: Against Reading" "Brottman challenges the accepted wisdom that reading is inherently uplifting, arguing that it turns us into antisocial misanthropes who would do better to be out in the world than home with a book."

I say, maybe the world is better off without us.