Sometimes I feel a very keen compulsion to be spectacularly lazy and let my brain turn to mush and leak out of my ears. To be clear, I don’t mean regular laziness (a reluctance to lift things above my head, ect) to which I am a devoted subscriber, but a more ambiguous mental laziness.
I suspect that without the rigors of the school work that I was accustom to and lacking a proper employment, I’ll become a slack-jawed person who can’t piece together the phonetics of personalized license plates. I’ll spend my days mulling over the riddles on the back of the Fruity Pebbles box and being confused by military time. I have a strangely acute desire to never be outsmarted by my breakfast, so I have taken it upon myself to hamper the liquidation of my brains whenever possibly convenient.
Since I don’t have a TV and I hate sodoku like early New England hated the Quakers, I’ve been forced to find other methods of exercise for my brain-case. Usually I just read. However, since I am often reading, it doesn’t feel particularly productive.
So I try to read things that seem difficult (read: boring). And since I am by nature a boring person who is drawn to boring books (I avoid things that remotely imply adventure in favor of excessive dialog, usually regarding people who don’t have sufficient dowries), this quest requires a severe level of boring.
To bring this back around to a vague sort of point, I’ve been reading Daniel Deronda for the last few days, and it’s been kicking my ass. I’m moving through it as a snail’s pace and growing impatient with things that I would usually think just dandy (love between first cousins, getting your shoulder re-set by a blacksmith after a hunting accident where your horse breaks all of its knees). I am assailed by the tediousness of the wording. Jesus-in-a-juicebox, I’m on page 112, and where is this Daniel Deronda already?
Mind you, this certainly isn’t the first time that I have been defeated; my previous conquers include Ulysses and several huge books with a rearing horse and an evil knight in black armor on the cover. But I was surprised to find myself so daunted by good old George Eliot, since I am moderately fond of The Mill on the Floss (or at least I was until I rented the crap mini-series in misguided flurry of BBC fervor).
And yet, whenever I have time to read I find myself accidentally misplacing Daniel Deronda and searching out something I’ve read 200 times before. Hence the laziness and inevitable leaky brain.
I suspect that without the rigors of the school work that I was accustom to and lacking a proper employment, I’ll become a slack-jawed person who can’t piece together the phonetics of personalized license plates. I’ll spend my days mulling over the riddles on the back of the Fruity Pebbles box and being confused by military time. I have a strangely acute desire to never be outsmarted by my breakfast, so I have taken it upon myself to hamper the liquidation of my brains whenever possibly convenient.
Since I don’t have a TV and I hate sodoku like early New England hated the Quakers, I’ve been forced to find other methods of exercise for my brain-case. Usually I just read. However, since I am often reading, it doesn’t feel particularly productive.
So I try to read things that seem difficult (read: boring). And since I am by nature a boring person who is drawn to boring books (I avoid things that remotely imply adventure in favor of excessive dialog, usually regarding people who don’t have sufficient dowries), this quest requires a severe level of boring.
To bring this back around to a vague sort of point, I’ve been reading Daniel Deronda for the last few days, and it’s been kicking my ass. I’m moving through it as a snail’s pace and growing impatient with things that I would usually think just dandy (love between first cousins, getting your shoulder re-set by a blacksmith after a hunting accident where your horse breaks all of its knees). I am assailed by the tediousness of the wording. Jesus-in-a-juicebox, I’m on page 112, and where is this Daniel Deronda already?
Mind you, this certainly isn’t the first time that I have been defeated; my previous conquers include Ulysses and several huge books with a rearing horse and an evil knight in black armor on the cover. But I was surprised to find myself so daunted by good old George Eliot, since I am moderately fond of The Mill on the Floss (or at least I was until I rented the crap mini-series in misguided flurry of BBC fervor).
And yet, whenever I have time to read I find myself accidentally misplacing Daniel Deronda and searching out something I’ve read 200 times before. Hence the laziness and inevitable leaky brain.
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