January 26

Today, I am re-emerging into general society.  I haven’t been sick.  I haven’t been traveling.  I’ve been reading.  Since living in Kentucky, I’ve had Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons sitting on my book shelf and I brought it back with me when I moved.  I recently picked up Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. For a while, I was really enjoying it, but it began, at first ever so lightly, to weigh on my soul.  Soon enough I was simply trying, almost desperately, to finish it before I picked up another book.  But I’ll be damned if The Fountainhead’s dreariness dragged me down so much that the time I spent with that book at each interval waned a little more every time until I just couldn’t pick it up anymore, as if it had become a bag of bricks (which is all the more figurative because I was actually listening to it on audio).  I do hope at some point to be able to finish it, if for no other reason than to say I have read it.  Maybe only for that reason.

So I finally succumbed to my greater desire to start the Tom Wolfe book.  I’ve been told if I want to understand what life is like on a big state or private secular university campus (important if I ever end up working at one), this book will let me know.  And for the last week, this book absorbed me.  All I wanted to do was read it.  I didn’t want to go out.  I didn’t want to work (I did, of course), and any break or bus ride I had, I was reading it.  I devoured it.  It was crude.  The dialogue was true to college life dialogue, which is to say riddled with likes and bad grammar and heavily peppered with the various uses of the F word.  But it was a look into the undergraduate life of any pick of large universities countrywide.  It is actually a thinly veiled depiction of Duke (complete with a top-notch basketball team), where the author’s daughter went to school.  And it was very intriguing.  

I finished the book last night and now I am coming out of my cocoon, ever so slowly, my eyes slowly adjusting to the light, because, hey, the sun is out in Portland today!  If only I were coming out with beautiful butterfly wings, but it’s not that kind of cocoon. That process of re-emerging after living in a book is always a strange one, and sometimes slower than it seems it should be.  I am remembering what I found important.  I am paying attention to the news again (such as my friend’s friend finally being rescued this week after being held hostage by Somali pirates!).  And I’m thinking about what I want to do tomorrow, because I get paid.

The next book I’m going to pick up is Robert Gilmore’s Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics.  For some reason, I don’t think it will be quite as much of a page turner.  I’m also going to delve into the gospel of John, maybe even with a group of college students.  But not from a big state university.  Not yet, anyway.

And I’m going to keep praying that a job I’ll love shows up as I continue to search for more meaningful work.  Sigh.