random thoughts – Day 2,302 (Saturday) – independent reading

It has been such a weird week that I didn’t even know what day it was today. I knew it was July 4, but I kept thinking it was Sunday instead of Saturday. I think the heat this week fried my brain. The house has offered little to no relief from the heat and held steady at four to five degrees hotter inside than outside for the past four days. It hasn't seemed to help lowering shades and closing curtains against the sun. I’m apparently living in a sauna.

Earlier tonight (hours ago!), the outside temperature dropped to a comfortable 73 degrees with a steady breeze that seemed to come from the precise direction to avoid every one of my windows. As a result, several hours later, the thermostat is still showing the temperature as 83 degrees inside as the temperature continues to drop outside. I don’t understand.

New best friend.

It may have been Independence Day with lots of activities happening, but, with the exception of a walk around 6:00, I stayed home all day inside the slow cooker. The cookout I was invited to had already been moved to Sunday due to the weather and I just couldn’t justify going alone to a parade or any other celebration full of families, couples, friend groups, i.e. crowds of people who are not solitary singletons in a long-term committed love-hate relationship with their independent lifestyle. I stayed home, laid out on the couch under my new best friend the ceiling fan, ice water nearby, and read. 

I finished The Hunger Games last night and started Catching Fire this morning. I read The Hunger Games when it first came out and didn’t remember any of it. The neighborhood little library had the entire trilogy so I snatched them all a few days ago with the intention of plowing through them quickly so I can put them back for someone else. So far, so good and I’m halfway through the second book.

The frequent library book exchanges and laying on the couch sweating and reading has sent me back to the summers when I was nine and ten years old, before we moved across town. There were no girls my age on our dead-end street and the several boys on the street were busy hanging around with my brother and ignoring me (unless they were torturing me), so books filled the gaping social hole in my life. The early social isolation training came in handy during the pandemic and again in what are turning out to be my recluse years. I’m now in a contest with myself to see how many books I can read this year.

Friends and family on Goodreads, who have jobs and spouses, have been reading impressive numbers of books the past several years and I, without any such real-world distractions and impositions on my time, have read a mere sliver of a fraction of some of their totals. It’s time for me to stop wasting so much time on social media, LinkedIn, and streaming channels. Social media stresses me out, there is nothing I want to watch on cable, Netflix, or Prime, and I’ve accepted the impossible reality of the job market for laid-off people my age and abandoned the search, so it’s time to shift gears. It’s books. For now, anyway.  I shift gears a lot, and in a couple weeks may suddenly be determined to jump out of a plane or weave baskets or start frequenting a rage room to smash stuff or something. We’ll see.