Underneath It All

Gina asked me how many hours of sleep I manage to get, on average.

I know a lot of people who are insomniacs.

Me? I'm the opposite. If anything, I might be a touch narcoleptic. And trust me, I'm grateful. I had this rare bout of insomnia on Saturday, and it was torture, squeezing my eyes shut, willing sleep to come and knowing it wasn't; lifting my head off the pillow practically every hour, to see what time it was; and then yawning like crazy the next day, wanting to sleep but forcing myself to stay awake so I'd be able to sleep later at night.

I figured I'd read.

I have a whole stack of books I haven't gotten around to reading.

I picked up "The Hotel New Hampshire" by John Irving. A few pages in, and it's not too bad. I mean, "A Prayer For Owen Meaney" was bad. Really bad. I liked "The Cider House Rules" and enjoyed "The Fourth Hand", but I didn't particularly like that one about the widow. I never even finished that one.

Finished reading "Freakonomics" the other day and I've already started in on Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point". It reminds me of "Linked", which was so fucking boring.

I noticed that Gina and I tend to read the same books at the same time. Like, one of us will say, "I'm reading 'The Kite Runner' right now" and the other person will go, "I just read that!" or "I just got a copy of that!"

I've decided, though, that I'm going to lay off on buying any more books 'cause I don't really make it a habit to re-read a lot of things. Besides, I like the library. It's free, first of all. And secondly? It's already been handled by tons of other readers, so I don't feel any sense of guilt if I fold over a page to mark off a place in the book or if I accidentally spill something on it...not that I'd do any of that. I mean, I don't go around defacing public property.