ha ha ha ha ha!

This "take a deep breath and let it go" thing is a good thing to work on! I've already let three things go that could have possibly made me angry, between yesterday morning and now. And they were all stupid things - the most recent being that I took the pendant I wanted to wear out of my jewelry box and the chain was all tangled. Instead of getting mad about it, I took a deep breath and said, you have time to sit down and untangle this. And I did. I feel my blood pressure rise a little bit, and I remind myself to take a breath and let it go...and it works.

I think I had started carrying around a lot of hostility recently (I don't know why) and I just need to remind myself that that's not me, I need to let it go.

And I got so much done yesterday...I made a list, and just started knocking off tasks. So I made a list again today.

I'm reading more on "Endless Forms most Beautiful" and I think I've grokked better how the complexity of development - and gene control in big complex animals - works. I'm also nearly to the point of attaching the first sleeve of the Hourglass pullover. It is good to have some kind of big simple-stockinette thing to work on while I read.

My "relaxation reading" (as opposed to "learning and maybe use the information in teaching reading") right now is Founding Brothers. I started it this spring and never got very far into it before I got distracted (that happens to me with books). But now I want to finish it.

And wow, if Ellis is anywhere near accurate, it's sort of a miracle that the Constitution was ratified at all...so many people fighting over so many things. (At least the "fights" - from what Ellis prints of the speeches and counter speeches made - are more civil than they are today).

I know I mentioned the "anti-aliteracy" PSA last week. And I mentioned all the different kinds of reading I do...there's bathtub reading, which means a mystery novel, usually one set somewhere far away (London or Florence or Japan) and bubbles or bath salt.

There's pure-comfort reading, which is either a good Golden Era mystery or one of the many children's "chapter books" I either barely remember reading or somehow overlooked as a child (Seriously: why did no one sit me down with Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" sequence and say: "you like the Narnia books. You will like these."?).

There's getting-lost-in-the-story reading, which some of the "children's chapter books" also fall into, but also Trollope and Dickens and other good novelists. Where I can sit back and let my imagination play movie director, and imagine up what the characters look like (I almost NEVER "cast" them with actual movie actors; it is not that I am making a movie of the book; rather, I am creating the world the book lays out) and what the setting is like, sometimes even down to the smells and sounds if it's a really good book.

There's comfortable but elucidating reading: any of the history books I read because I feel like I don't remember enough of the American History I learned (despite having excellent teachers, both in 8th grade and high school). Or other history, because it got short shrift in the school system. Or linguistics, which has always been an interest of mine since I took a linguistics class to satisfy my social-science requirement in college.

There's deepening-my-knowledge reading, where I read in some area slightly outside my field of expertise (like the evo-devo book I mentioned above) but it's knowledge I can use in teaching, or books I can suggest to people doing Directed Readings with me. And there's also the pleasure of the little mental "plink," of the sense of a puzzle piece falling into place, when I read something that fits in with something I already know. (I imagine my knowledge base as looking something like one of Buckminster Fuller's domes, where each fact is either a vertex or one of the "sticks" making up the dome. Only my domes are more complex and aren't perfectly symmetrical).

And there's "so I feel less lonely" reading. Reading essays by knitters and quilters and other-general-crafters (like Linda Ligon's nice little book which is mainly weaving and spinning). Also a lot of the theology I read... the Marva Dawn and C.S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris. The reminding myself that fame and fortune are not all there is, that I am valuable even when I don't particularly feel that way, and that a lot of the things I do, even though they look quixotic or even like a royal waste of time to many in society, do have importance and value in the greater scheme of the Universe.

I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting - the reading of cookbooks while I sit at table, the reading of pattern-books for inspiration and direction, the reading of journal articles (which is usually not FUN in the way that reading books like "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" is FUN) to glean for information I can use in my own research...

But anyway, as I said earlier, reading is such a huge part of my life that although I guess I can understand people choosing not to read, I really don't UNDERSTAND understand.