Notes From Sea Level - Conversations With Writers

Today's ramblings are about two main topics: tsunamis and how to read without going frantic.

Part the First - Tsunamis

Sadly enough, I am enough of an optimist/pessimist/skeptic that this morning my reason for renting the car and renting it early to get to work was so that I could avoid the panicking community en route to inland rather than to avoid a wall of water. It's pretty sad when you hold greater respect for a mob than for mother nature.

Throughout the day, the mob didn't improve. The pictures in the morning that appeared with the local warnings and updates were pictures of Japan, not local sights, and the local pictures that did come in by the end of the day didn't look nearly as devastating as the pictures from Japan. A huge let-down. Again. The Bay Area avoids another natural catastrophe.

I'm not saying that I want a monumental natural disaster--not only do I not want one, but I don't want one while I'm at work in the more looter-prone area of the East Bay that I work in--but the weather service freaked out before we were to get the snow that we didn't get and it freaked out this morning. To my understanding, the reason for the poor fireworks was low tide. Um, don't we know when low tide is going to fall? Why was this so shocking?

I'll never get it.

Part the Second - Conversations With Writers

For the past two and half months I have been on a panic-driven quest to "read down" my stack of already purchased books in my room, only to go and check out whole stacks of more from the library. I spend my weekend and weeknights attacking page counts and recording them faithfully in GoodReads and looking like a literature major.

Except it's making me resentful.

So I'm backing up and taking stock and resetting a bit, and treating each book like a conversation with the author, instead of a series of pages to consume. The previous way was giving me a reading disfunction--hopefully the new way will bring back my love of words.

Onward, dear reader.