words on a page

Current Mood: overly pensive and reflective, of late

SO. I have not written here in a long while. I think there is a relationship between how I feel and how much I write. When I am in a bad mood and things aren't going well, I clam up. When things are super busy and there's a lot to do, I feel compelled to procrastinate and write about it.

But perhaps more on that later.

When I was a kid I used to read all the time. We didn't have cable TV, just a few boring channels and I didn't get shows like Seinfeld or Married With Children. Computer time was limited by my parents - no more than two hours a day for non school entertainment, a rule that I bitched about but in retrospect was probably a good idea. Something I would think about for my kids, if and when that came about. I had a decent amount of video game exposure, but before DLC and online content, and without much money for new games, the ones I had got beaten pretty quickly.

Hours. And. Hours. spent playing Super Mario Kart.

So I read a lot. A LOT. Mom and Dad were pretty good about taking my siblings and me to the library pretty regularly, another thing I will do for my kids. I strongly strongly believe there's a correlation between reading and overall intelligence. At times (especially during the summer) I had a healthy competition with my older sister for books read, so that didn't hurt.

I had a nearly insatiable appetite for reading. More books than I could carry from the library, spending allowance on books from Borders, Waldenbooks, Barnes and Noble, Half Price Books and other places I remember quite well. I'd read in the car (I didn't get sick - sis did), and on the bus. I read while mom ran errands. I read at the dinner table. I read under the blankets at night, with a flashlight.

My favorites were always science fiction, fantasy, biographies, and pretty much any science book. Not much has changed in my tastes. I was really proud to always be well beyond my grade level of reading.

Then, I'm not quite sure when or how, I just kinda stopped reading books all the time. I went from a few books a week to like, maybe one or two a month. Then to just a handful of books a year. My guess was that was when school really ramped up? Late high school?

The other day I was wondering where all that reading went, and I think I still do read a lot - but not so much in book form. On the web. It...sneaks by that way? It never feels like reading a book, but I know I do a lot of it. I read somewhere that it is theorized that kids today may be reading just as much as past generations, but it's fragmented, and largely online, so maybe that's what's going on?

A lot of this sort of thing going on. I am helpless against it.

What brought on all of this? Roommate Greg loaned me Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six the other day, and I'm tearing through it (which makes me feel really good). Probably the most concentrated amount of book reading I've done in several months. Just made me think of my childhood, I guess.