Getting Comfy

As the winter is wearing on, everything is all about comfort these days. People are putting on their comfortable winter coats and scarves (yes, even in San Francisco. I am aware that we are all wimps), they are eating comfort food, and doing "comfort things" I suppose. What those are, I can only guess. I just picture sitting by a fire, maybe cuddling, maybe drinking hot toddies.

Ladies, I would just like to say that at this moment, my schedule is almost entirely clear and open if any of you wish to pursue any of these activities with a certain charming and verbally awkward blogger. But my chimney is broken, so you have to supply the fireplace.

I find that throughout the year, I have a whole different comfort tradition: I am a comfort reader. It sounds silly perhaps, but from time to time I just feel the need to go back and read books that I know and love. Sometimes it's because I want to re-capture a feeling that a book stirs up in me, sometimes it's because I want to re-immerse myself in a world that the book creates, and sometimes it's just that I love the story so much that I want to take it all in again. I don't know if this is a unique feature to myself or not. As far as I know, a number of people are not re-readers. I'm not always, but there are a number of books that I can pick up and read pretty much any time and I know I'll be happy about it.

This came up in conversation the other day: I was discussing holiday traditions with some friends, and I mentioned that for probably about six years straight from the time I was a young teenager, I used to read Stephen King's The Shining every Christmas break. It started because it was the first chance I had to do pleasure reading after my Fall semester had ended, really. I had purchased a copy at a garage sale, and found myself so taken with it that I couldn't put the book down. It's the 100% honest truth that reading that book is when I realized I needed glasses: I'd find that reading for more than 2-3 hours at a time would give me one hell of a headache, so I'd have to stop reading, little did I know it was due to eye strain from my farsightedness. But I digress. I read that book in a few days, and decided then and there to make it an annual tradition, and I think that, especially given my recent lack of employment, this is the perfect chance to re-kindle that tradition.

There are other titles of course, the Scott Pilgrim series being a prime example, where I just feel like it is totally worth my time to go back and read it all again. Specifically in that case, they are quick reads, so I can usually knock it all out in a day or two. On the Road is obviously an "A-number-one" example (between pleasure reading and thesis prep, I have got to be nearing my twentieth read of that one).

But I'm not here to catalog books I read all the time, (you can check out my GoodReads account for that). Rather, I am curious about why certain books are so re-readable, and if I'm a freak for having reading habits like this. Is it a book nerd thing? (I hesitate to say "scholar" because if you know me, you know that's not a term I'd usually apply to myself) Is it something else? Is it something that authors actually strive for? I know this seems disjointed, but I guess I just have to keep hearkening back to the base question: am I alone in my comfort reading repetition? I know a lot of people who re-read books, but are there people like me out there who re-re-re-re-read stuff? If any of you out there have an opinion, please chime in, I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Dream Big

I had a dream the other night. It was about a girl. A real girl. A girl I "kind of have a thing for" I suppose you could say. We don't have a relationship or anything like that - we know each other by name, we interact from time to time, and we are friends on Facebook, but that's the extent of it. She has a boyfriend, and myself being an upstanding young man, I would never stand in the way of that. Honestly, I don't believe, even in my most delusional mind, that she thinks of me the way I think of her. Yet still, she popped up in a dream I had the other day. I never tend to remember a whole lot of my dreams, so the details are hazy, but I remember the gist of it, and that is what this whole blog is about today.

See, usually when someone talks about a dream involving the opposite sex, especially a member of the opposite sex that they are attracted to, it is some kind of sexy dream, or a dream where that person is just so overwhelmingly in to you that you wake up feeling like a million bucks. It's something that bolsters your confidence and creates a reality in your dream world that you can never accomplish in waking life. But here's the thing about my dream from the other day: it was wildly awkward, probably just as awkward as I would be in real life. Instead of dreaming of fun sexytimes and what I could do with this girl given the lack of restrictions, relationships, and hangups, what did I do? I awkwardly talked with her for like half and hour, at the end of which I was just as oblivious about her feelings towards me as I am in real life.

So what the hell is wrong with me? Has my subconscious become just as awkward and stammery around women in my dreams as I am in real life? For all my ways with words in written English, for my master's degree in literature, I am absolutely fucking terrible at talking to women. But why should this carry over into my dreams? Shouldn't I be the great Lothario that I always wanted to be in real life? Shouldn't I be witty and charming and suave? Apparently not. Apparently my dreams are pretty much useless in fulfilling any of those desires, even in a dream world of my own creation. Apparently my dreams are trying to tell me that no matter how I try or how far I may go, I will never be that charmer that I would like to be.

Maybe it's for the best. Maybe I'm not meant to be the silver-tongued ladies man. Maybe I will in fact find a girl who doesn't mind the fact that i trip over my words like a verbal Inspector Clouseau. Hopefully, some day my long, mildly awkward pauses wil come into vogue and I'll be every girl's dream come true. But until that day comes, I will continue to be kind of quiet, always short on things to talk about, and a huge fan of telling women I'm interested in that "yeah... you know... I think you're, well.... pretty awesome. And maybe.... some time that works for both of us maybe.... we could, ah, you know, like, get coffee? Or a drink? Or dinner? My treat? I think? Because, yeah, your'e pretty awesome and you're pretty much... you're... definitely almost exactly the kind of person that I want to get a drink or some food with. But if not that's cool." and then quietly slurk away while they are trying to suss out exactly what I'm yammering about.

Revival?

I'm not going to go making a bunch of crazy promises or anything, but seeing as how I will now have free time again, and feel like I need to make a more concentrated effort to write regularly regardless of my employment status, I hope to bring this blog, like a phoenix, back from the ashes.

But seeing as how I'm at work at the moment, all I'm going to do is insert this video, because it is just everything that is right with the world right now for me.



But check back soon, I will be writing here again. At least for a little bit, ya know?