It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

Would we have coffee with… Laura Ingalls Wilder?

The library in my hometown in consisted primarily of Harlequins, 1970s issues of National Geographic and an assortment of post war books about crop rotation, so my Mom was awesome enough to drive my brother and I the 20 miles to the downtown library in the county seat multiple times during the summers so we could partake of the wider selection AND so we could join in on the summer reading program.  You signed up, they gave you this cardboard booklet to record the books you read and at the end of the summer you turned in your card and got a whole envelope of prizes (mostly coupons for free stuff ice-cream, book marks, stickers…).

I’m pretty sure it was for my word-loathing brother that Mom was so gung ho to get us involved in the activity.  Lord knows, I didn’t need bribery to get me to read.  All the same, I accepted the challenge.  While my brother slogged to his quota, I was adding extra lines to my card and writing really small to get in every single book I devoured.  It was never about the coupons or the certificate.

I’ve kind of missed it.

So imagine my total delight when I logged on to peruse the library catalog this week and found out that I can once again embrace the challenge of absorbing large amounts of text for fun (and potential profit).  And I don’t have to try and pass myself off as being 13 and under.  It’s being billed as “6 in 12″ (6 books in 12 months).  To be honest, that exceeds the number of books I’ve read per year in the past few years, thanks to jobs, exams, etc. After a few too many years of not inhaling books at my childhood rate, it’s time to get my game back.

Time to add lines to my virtual, grown-up read-a-thon card.

You may remember that I once mentioned my battle against The Stack:  the literal, physical stack of books I have amassed that I need to read.  You would think that with The Stack to contend with, the last thing I would do is get sucked in by the Time Vampire that’s been eating away at me this week.

Project Gutenberg.

This one has been an addictive problem for me before.  If you’re not familiar with this most awesome of sites, get familiar.  Oodles of public domain works, ripe for the downloading.  Free.  Legal.  Plentiful.  And many times, totally out of print.  If you like classics. you will be in hog heaven.

It started when I was trying to figure out an LM Montgomery passage I had running through my head.  Rather than go upstairs and consult my non-negligible collection of Ms. Montgomery’s novels and short stories….I hit Gutenberg.

And didn’t find my way out for several hours.  I wound up re-reading a collection of short stories, the moving on to read half of Sir Walter Scott’s” The Lady of the Lake”.  And then I downloaded a few things to a thumb drive in anticipation of some travel I’ll be on later this month.  As if I wasn’t going to bring an actual print book with me.

I do favor hard copies, but when you get the sudden urge to re-read P&P and you’re already ensconced in the recliner, why would you disturb yourself to go get something off the shelf upstairs?  And once you’re there and you remember that you’ve really been meaning to read Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.  Oh, oh, and what about The Seven Little Australians? You’re fairly sure that’s out of copyright….

You get the idea.

My hero of all time, Sandra Day O’Connor (allegedly) once said that “Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short winded.”

Sadly, I’m about as asthmatic as Kristy here.

I’m a semi-guilty procrastinator.  The “semi” comes from the fact that while I feel bad for my bad habit of delaying, I don’t feel bad enough to overcome it.

Housework is the worst.  As I type this I’m surrounded by laundry I need to iron and fold, a kitchen I need to clean, paper-recycling I should have hauled off weeks ago, bags for Goodwill donation that have been lurking in corners for, well, some of them for nearly a year.  There’s always mañana, right?

But the oddest and most disturbing part of my procrastination is the weird self punishment that comes with it.  I’ve been itching to write for months now, but I steadfastly refuse to allow myself to do so until I finish the housework.  So I wind up alphabetizing CDs on the shelf  (a chore that I’m not keen on, and which honestly didn’t really need to be done).  Same with reading.  You remember my battle with The Stack?  Yeah, I’ll never win as long as I tell myself I can’t pick up that book until I unload the dishwasher.  So I opt to rearrange the drinking glasses and then read some fanfic.  I have several films I want to see but until I’ve taken that recycling up to the bins at the school, I can’t watch–but I can totally watch TV and dust bookshelves.

Whiskey.  Tango.  Foxtrot.

The bizarre weighting of activities in the court of my brain is just beyond nuts.  I can only conclude that not only am I procrastinating against doing crap I don’t enjoy, like housework, but also against doing things I really, really love.  I’m left swimming in a sea of activities which fall in the middle of the enjoyment scale and rank low on the scale of necessity.  I guess I should appreciate the symmetry, but mostly I’m worried about my own mental state.

And I’m also worried about mustering the give-a-damn to finish sorting socks before Monday.