Books

There was hardly anyone around when I returned (as I found out there were only 5 people here for New Years – good call or great call to leave for the New Year?). The people who were around welcomed me back with smiles and a hand in the air signaling that “the other” had left. Yes he is gone. And since my arrival I have completely cleaned and rearranged my room, done all of my laundry, went back to work in the garden, started the 2nd trimester of school, read every single article and finished two magazines that I had hidden away and written this series of blog posts.

I have nothing left to read, save Don Quixote, which I snagged from Colin’s trash pile. But come on Greg, seriously? The closest I ever came to reading an epic like that was watching Wishbone in the 4th grade. In fact I think the only books worth remembering from College that I have read from front to cover haven been historical analyses of international relations ranging from Pre-Medieval Ireland to the Cold War and a few social theory books for a philosophy course. I did make it through “The Republic,” but that was a fluke. Yes, my major was Psychology and no I did not make it through a single textbook cover to cover (I don’t read indexes or acknowledgements ).

One of my favorite lines from a movie is coming to mind…”you know in a few years you’re going to finally do some thinking of your own and you’ll realize two truths; 1) don’t do that (referring to plagiarizing lines from a book) and 2) you dropped $150,000 on an education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late charges from the library.” I may not have read every line of every book, but I can guarantee that I have experienced and remember more of the information from those classes than most. Thinking, not regurgitating is what I am interested in. It’s no wonder why my best marks came on papers and projects as opposed to exams. Spend countless hours until the sun comes up scanning every line hoping to pick up just a little more information that may or may not be on the test or spend countless hours until the sun comes up thinking through and turning a mental maze of experiences and thoughts related to a specific topic into a yellow brick road? Not even a question.

You can know every theory and idea related to a topic, but until you experience it and see it in the living the information isn’t worth the effort. To compare, it is like the ISO machines at the gym. They isolate muscles, which would be great if our body only used single muscles to perform everyday actions. But the truth is that our body works in unison, in muscle groups. You can isolate a muscle as much as you want, but unless the supporting cast of ligaments, joints, secondary muscles, nervous system, and stabilizers are on the same page you aren’t doing anything worthwhile. The machines are safe, reliable, and almost idiotproof. That is reading (save history, sports, and international relations related material), to me. And don’t get me wrong, reading is important (unlike those machines at the gym). It works a different part of my brain and there are benefits to it, which I try to utilize; but for better or worse I take a different approach. I’m the guy who would rather fly to Africa, make mistakes, and have an adventure in learning how to speak French as opposed to hitting the books.