division

I want to read.

Summertime was an exciting time for me growing up. Pizza Hut, had a program called Book It that encouraged kiddies to read by offering free personal pan pizzas as incentives. Now, I love me some Pizza Hut pan pizza, but even more motivating than the pie was the satisfaction I got from filling up their logs of reading faster than my librarian could hand out the slip. I was the girl who'd show up to the library, check out the max limit of books, and have them back within the week for the next round. I read just about everything they suggested, and then everything my friends read: The Boxcar Children, Choose Your Own Adventure, Encyclopedia Brown, and as time went on, authors like Christopher Pike, RL Stine, or even the controversial VC Andrews.

During the school year, the Scholastic Book fairs would come through town, and I usually tried to convince my parents to at least let me buy one good book.

I have fond memories of some of the books we read later in school: Watership Down, Fareheight 451, Brave New World.

All this, and yet once I hit middle school, I was "a math person". Horror of horrors, I was on Math Team, and you know what? I was good. SAT time? Yeah, the math section was my specialty. Honors programs? Math Math Math. When it came time for college, my major required as little reading or writing as possible, and we were proud of it. Writing was fluff, and reading was a chore. Suddenly, the years spent enjoying the written word were inconsequential. I was now a "numbers" kinda gal, who had time for books?

The tide started turning back a few years ago. Bridget Jones, the Shopaholic series, Harry Potter, The Interpreter of Maladies, Nick Hornby's offerings -- books were back in my world. Numbers seem far less interesting these days than words. I like to explore the difference in shades of meaning between words like pontifcate, extrapolate, and elaborate. I just like the way those words roll off the tongue.

This blog has encouraged me to think about language, and how to paint a picture. This afternoon, a friend gave me a math problem that my former self would have solved in a matter of minutes. And yet today, my mind couldn't make sense of those numbers. Tonight I want to do nothing more than curl up on my couch with a good book (or blog for that matter), and read until my eyes can no longer stay open.

Why does it seem I can only have one or the other?