The Saturday before Christmas, it poured down rain and really ruined my Christmas shopping plans.  That night, I went out with some friends, enjoyed some choice libations, and ate some good food.  I did not feel awesome on Sunday, which was unfortunate because I had put off all my Christmas shopping until that day.  I should have sucked it up and gotten off the couch and shopped anyway, but I didn’t feel good, more so than a typical Sunday hangover.  I canceled my brunch plans, and continued to wallow in my uncomfortableness while ordering Christmas presents on amazon.

At one point, Briscoe climbed into my lap and wanted to lie across my stomach on the couch.  It hurt.  A sharp pain, that caught me off guard with its severity.  I figured I could not be that sick, considering I still wanted to eat my Basil leftovers from the night before and the bojangles I had for breakfast had still tasted awesome.  That night, I had a hard time falling asleep because of a sharp pain in my stomach.  It was directly below my belly button, and felt like a hot knot was being tightened and loosened.  I decided that the food I’d eaten and the hangover had left me with some indigestion.

Monday morning, I woke up, went to work, drank coffee, ate breakfast, and went about my day.  I didn’t feel awesome, but I figured I was paying for my indulgent weekend.  At lunch, I wasn’t super hungry, so I ate a pack of toast chee and drank a diet coke (a meal that kept me alive in law school).  About 2 pm, a wave of nausea washed over me, and took me by surprise.  I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew I had to go home.  I felt silly telling my supervisor the week of Christmas that I had to have the afternoon off because my stomach hurt.  It seemed too convenient.  But I must have been green by that point because she offered to drive me home and made me call her when I got there.

Once home, I wanted very much to barf.  This never happened.  I took some Dramamine and tried to nap, but the pain woke me up, which is not the way Dramamine is supposed to work.  I kept taking my temperature, but I didn’t have a fever.  I never got sick to my stomach or threw up.  I just felt like my stomach was on fire, and I had waves of uncomfortableness that would radiate through my entire system, sometimes feeling like they were coming up my throat.  I’ve never had heartburn or any problem like that, so I thought maybe this is what people complain about all the time and why prilosec is so successful.

At one point, I finally got out of bed to get some water and check on Briscoe.  The exponential increase in pain since I got into the bed was starting to freak me out.  There was something about this pain that was unfamiliar, a pain that did not have a memory of another time.  There was also a bizarre metallic taste in my mouth that I couldn’t seem to shake.  I got back in the bed, and had a conversation with Libby about my pain.  She was with Bryan, who had his appendix out in college, and after five minutes chatting with them, I knew I was in trouble and was going to have to have my appendix taken out.  At the realization that I was going to have to go to the hospital, I burst into tears.  Then I told myself I had to get it together, and got myself composed.

I am a hypochondriac.  I always have been.  I have been convinced no less than ten times in my life that I had appendicitis.  I have always been wrong.  Growing up it is drilled into your head that if you have a pain that starts in your stomach and moves to your right side, that you should seek medical attention.  I did NOT want to seek medical attention.  I wanted to go to sleep and wake up the next day and feel better.  I also knew that tons of people have had their appendix out and it isn’t that big of a deal.  I’d never had surgery before, and I didn’t want to go to the hospital.

But you know what?  No one asked me.  I called my mom, and she asked me if I could stand up straight.  Hmm, no, actually I could not stand up straight.  Or, I almost could, but it hurt like a bitch to try and I didn’t want to stand up straight.  I wanted to double it and not move at all.  My mom told me I needed to call Ashley, my sweet friend who is a pediatric hemotology/oncology fellow at MUSC.  I called Ashley, and told her I thought I had appendicitis.  Dr. Ashley told me I needed to go to the ER.  Ugh.

Jennifer and Peter came over immediately.  While waiting for them to get there, I took a shower, and put on my new lululemon yoga pants because they are the most comfortable things in the world.  I’d always been told you should make sure you take a shower every day because you never know when you might end up in the emergency room or what might happened to you after you get there.  Haha.

Peter took Briscoe home with him to have a spend the night party with Fin and Kate, and Jennifer took me to the ER around 9 pm.  The drive to the ER was TORTURE.  It was amazing how fast my pain was increasing and how painful even the smallest jolt became.  I felt a little stupid walking into the emergency room and saying, “I think I have appendicitis.”  What am I, WebMD?  As I sat in the almost desolate emergency room, I thought I would be in pain for the rest of my life.  Up until that point the pain had been troublesome, but bearable.  Bearable was becoming a distant memory.

Once in the exam room, a very young maybe doctor strolled past the door, and upon seeing two girls, did a little back track and stuck his head in.  He seemed happy to see us, and proceeded to try to figure out what was troubling me.  He asked me lots of personal questions, and mashed all over my tummy, and bent my knees around and popped my heels with his palm.  He must have been a resident because then he ordered me some pain medication and a CT.  As soon as I received the drugs through the IV, I instantly felt much warmer and more pleasant, and everything around me became more agreeable.  In fact, things became rather hilarious.  Jennifer and my young doctor friend were cracking jokes and although the pain medication made everything extremely funny, laughing was still excruciatingly painful, and I was almost in tears before I could get them to stop making me laugh.

When I remarked to the nurse that I could feel the medication, she said I must not take much pain medication because she’d only given me half a milligram.  I was dying of thirst by this point because my mom had told me not to drink anything in case I had to have surgery, which was good because I had to drink four cups of some sort of contrast stuff for the CT.  It had crushed ice in it and tasted sort of like the way water tastes right after you brush your teeth with baking soda toothpaste, and anyway, I didn’t mind because I was sort of floating in space at this point.  Jennifer fell asleep in the chair.  I kept wanting them to bring her a bed in too, but the room was really small.

Luckily, I was reading The Hunger Games, which, if you haven’t read them, you should probably not start reading them until you have a good three or four days to read all three of them, or else the rest of your life might fall apart from neglect.  I sat in the semi dark, hopped up on pain medication, and happily read about Katniss while I sipped on my toothpaste flavored ice water.  When I was wheeled back to have my CT, I was starting to think being in the hospital wasn’t that bad, even if my garbage wheel chair had a wheel that was jacked like a broken grocery cart.  The CT girl said she had a hard time finding it, because all the wheel chairs had mysteriously disappeared.

The CT took about three seconds, and was pretty cool.  I’ve had an MRI of my neck before, and let’s just go ahead and be clear about the fact that CT scans are infinitely more pleasant than MRIs, even if it did freak me out a little bit.  For some reason, the idea of having a CT of your entire abdomen is a little scary.  Like, yeah, I’m pretty sure I have appendicitis, but what if it isn’t appendicitis?  What if, in addition to appendicitis, they find some crazy growth or imperfection in my abdomen that could kill me at any moment and I just didn’t know about it?  What if it is something I have to live with and can’t be fixed?  Thankfully, all of these thoughts were rather fleeting, because it is my mom’s job to worry about such things, and I was more concerned with making sure I got my cell phone charger before the damn thing died.

Not long after the CT, my young doctor friend came back in, patted me on the foot, and told me that the radiologist said I do have appendicitis and that the surgeon would be down to talk to me soon.  He acted like the fact it was appendicitis was excellent news.  I asked if I definitely had to have surgery.  He said, yes, there was no question I would have to have surgery.  After my crazy thoughts of what else the CT could reveal and all the other possibilities, I did experience a great sense of relief at the news I would definitely have to have surgery.  I called my mom, and she said she was on the way, but wanted to make sure I told the doctor about some rare health problem a distant cousin had that could possibly interfere with my being put under anesthesia.  Great.  I discussed with Jennifer whether I wanted my mom to get my laptop from my apartment.  She remarked that worrying about a laptop would not have been top on her list of concerns if she had just found out she would have to have surgery.  We decided I did not need my laptop.

The surgeon came in, introduced himself, and his pager went off and he had to leave the room.  Jennifer and I left the door open to see what was going on, and we were able to learn that a gunshot wound to the stomach had just arrived, which we eventually learned bumped me back in the line for surgery.  When I was told that my surgery might have to wait until 7 am (this was around midnight), I asked if there was a chance my appendix would rupture between now and then.  The answer was pretty much, um, maybe?  Hopefully not.  Ha.

Before I was taken upstairs to a real hospital room, I was given more pain medication, “for the road”.  The orderly who took me from the basement to the top floor of the hospital told me all about how he’d just had his appendix out, and that it was no big deal and he didn’t even take any of the Percocet they gave him, and he was walking around a few hours later.  He said the worst part about the experience was that they blow your abdomen up with some sort of gas for the procedure, so they have lots of room to move around in there, and then the gas disperses throughout your body and has a tendency to settle in your shoulders, or under your rib cage, or somewhere else where it becomes uncomfortable.  He said it was a weird feeling and that I just needed to move around a lot after the surgery so the gas would work itself out of my system.  This was the first I had heard about my stomach being blown up with gas, and I was little disturbed by this new piece of information.

My mom finally got to the hospital, and after getting lost in the catacombs of the ginormous complex for about half an hour, made it to my room.  She brought me some shampoo, because they wanted me to take a shower with some sort of sterile soap, and I figured I might as well wash my hair while I was at it, since I wasn’t going to surgery for a while.  Jennifer was finally allowed to go home and go to sleep.

As soon as I got out of the shower and figured out how to put on the extremely complicated gown, someone stuck their head in my room and wanted to know if I was ready.  It was about 3 am, and my hair was soaking wet, and I was a little confused.  Apparently, gunshot victim didn’t take too long, and they were ready for me.  Mama dried my hair for a minute (I couldn’t because the IVs in my arm were rather restrictive), and followed me down to the OR.  My cute young ER doctor friend was waiting for me at the OR and announced happily that he KNEW I would be down here later and that he was glad to see me.  He and some other young doctor friends appeared to be playing on facebook, which made me laugh.  The gunshot victim was wheeled out of the OR as I was waiting for the surgeon.

I was given some drugs, and then the surgeon came out and talked to me, and asked me if I had any questions.  I was starting to feel a little woozy, and the only intelligent question I had was, “Um, are you any good?”  Real smooth, insult the man who is about to save your life.  He looked at me as though my remark had taken him off guard and said, “Well, I like to think so!”  This is the last thing I remember before surgery.

The next thing I remember is someone telling me that it is not time to wake up and for me to go back to sleep.  Then I remember waking up back in the recovery room with my throat on absolute fire and a mask on my face that itched like crazy.  The next half hour were the most miserable.  They kept asking me to rate the pain.  What pain?  My throat?  The itchiness of my face?  Once I was back in my room, they gave me some extremely strong pain medication that made the next two hours quite pleasant, even if my nose did continue to itch. They told me how they had stitched me up with dissolving sutures and glued my incisions shut, which I found interesting.

Around 9 am they brought me a breakfast of liquids – broth, jello, juice.  Then around noon I got to order room service from a pretty exciting menu.  They even let me order a chocolate chip cookie and a sugar cookie.  Someone came in my room every ten to fifteen minutes to check on something, and I have to say I have no idea how anyone in the hospital could ever get any rest.  Right before they discharged me, my sweet Doctor Ashley stopped by to check on me and brought me a big plush flower.  I was also instructed that I didn’t have any dietary restrictions and could eat and drink whatever I wanted over Christmas.  Which was good because Travers and Natalie were concerned about how long it would be before I could drink beer, and Libby was concerned about me missing out on Christmas Ham.  Then the nurse gave me two Percocet “for the road.”  I only took one because I was concerned that if I took both of them I wouldn’t make it very far off down the road.

When Mama and I left the hospital, I was all turned around, and took us down the wrong street.  Kate hadn’t slept in two days, and was a little delirious herself.  While turning down a street, a woman on the corner started screaming at us.  Then we realized we had turned down the wrong way on a one way street.  Opps.  Luckily, we were able to pull into a driveway before having a head on collision.  Kate tried to say she was going to go to Harris Teeter after she got me in bed, but I told her she was crazy and that after we both took a long nap we could order Mellow Mushroom.

Since then, I have recovered nicely.  I only had to take the pain meds for a couple of days, and I was at Christmas party by Thursday night.  I’ve had a hard time getting all the glue off my stomach, but at this point most of it is gone.  I can’t pick up more than ten pounds at a time until February, but other than that, I feel good.  The only real disappointment was that the silver bullet didn’t get to go home for Christmas, so she still hasn’t hit 200,000 miles.  Maybe this week?

My new year resolution is to write more, so I promise I will be updating the blog more often.  I’m excited.  I hope you are too!

You know how when you date someone who isn’t nice to you, and then you date someone who is nice to you, and you think, wow, why did I ever put up with that last guy?  That’s the way I feel about my professional life.  It is unbelievable.

The most fun about this new job that I’ve acquired out of sheer luck and happenstance, is that it is in Charleston.  I didn’t want to leave Augusta, and I’m not sure I would have left Augusta if my professional life hadn’t forced my hand.  But fate intervened and I didn’t have a choice, or not a reasonable and mature choice.  The only thing for me to do was to pack up my life and move to Charleston for the job I’ve always wanted.  Life is so hard!  Haha.

So here I am, in my new amazing apartment downtown, trying to absorb what has happened to me.  Two months ago I had no idea any of this was going to happen.  I accepted the job less than a month ago, and tomorrow will be the end of my 3rd week at the new job.

I’ve missed my blog.  I’ve missed my blog friends.  And I’m looking forward to this new chapter in this new city.  I’m going to do my best to document it, because I know I’ll regret it forever if I don’t.   I feel like not writing was a reflection on how stifled I felt in life in general.  I don’t feel stifled anymore.

Oh, and I turn 30 on 10/10/10 – which is Sunday.  So get excited.  Briscoe is going to take lots of pictures.  She might even take some videos.  You never know with the fluffy puff.

Briscoe is asleep next to me, dreaming of something, because her legs twitch every few moments, like she is running in her sleep.  She and I went on a walk today and she has been very full of herself ever since. 

Sometimes, when I’m browsing facebook, and I notice that someone has something really uncool on their profile, like a guy who lists the notebook as one of his favorite movies or lists hootie and the blowfish as one of his favorite bands (you know, those guilty pleasure books, movies, bands that most people secretly like but pretend like they don’t) I immediately wonder – Is this person really cool and confident in themselves and really doesn’t give a damn that they still listen to the first Hanson album and loves the indigo girls? Or, is this person just dweebie enough to have no idea?  Does this make me a judgmental bitch?  Really, I know people in both categories.  Either is a distinct possibility. 

Oh, I was going to post about Serena Williams and Kanye.  But I’m too tired now and I can pretty much sum it up with three letters.  Boo.  Wait, here is a longer word – Unacceptable.  Childish, immature, and sort of scary.  I feel bad for Venus, she seems much less of a diva and much cooler of a person.  I can’t believe that Serena said that she didn’t understand why the line judge felt threatened.  Really?  Serena is what, like 6’3?  She’s a really large, imposing figure.  But you know who isn’t?  Kanye.  Taylor Swift towered over him.  Do you think that is why he took the mic away from her?  Because she’s 5’11 and had on heels and he’s 5’7? 

Honestly, I’m just always disappointed when super stars misbehave and try to intimidate those around them.  I don’t like it when you pick on the little line judge or the 17 year old county music singer when you are the most imposing female tennis player ever and one of the biggest icons in the music industry.  It seems, tacky.  But I do like the way Beyonce handled it.  She is classy.  

On a happier, lighter note, fall is here.  The mornings have become consistently cool and the fall smells are here.  The warm afternoon intensifies the tea olives and the late jasmine, gardenias and hydragas.  The damp humid, cooler mornings smell of oak bark, fallen leaves and wet grass.  I’ve been drinking a lot of starbucks.  Coffee is so much more enjoyable when it doesn’t make you sweat. 

Sweet dreams children, Briscoe has now rolled over on her back and is snoring with all four feet in the air.  I think I will join her.  It is much easier to count sheep when you have a live one laying at your feet.

Case in point -

“This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story,” Sanford said. “A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”*

Sanford said Chapur is his soul mate but he’s trying to fall back in love with his wife.**

“At that point I was very careful, everything was paid for in cash,” Sanford said. “And you won’t find a credit card record.”***

Culbertson said he believed his friend when he said that this was his only marital transgression. He thinks Sanford was simply caught off guard by “the power of darkness.”

“One of the quotes we use in our couples course is, ‘You can choose your sins, but you can’t choose your consequences,’” Culbertson said. “We used to use David as an example of that. Mark may be the 2009 version of a good example.  “Mark knew what David knew.”****

* SHUT UP!  Seriously!  Think about your four sons reading this and stop professing in the international news your love for the woman in Argentina!  STOP IT. 

** Lucky Mrs. Sanford, he’s TRYING to fall back in love with her. 

***Is he bragging about this?  Is he proud of how sneaky he was with his cash paying hotel rooms?

**** Did he REALLY just compare himself to King David?  REALLY?  AGGHH.  I’m absolutely blown away by his arrogance.  Please, just stop talking.  And don’t even get me started with how straight up crazy Culberson sounds. He sounds like a cult leader.   This is my favorite crazy quote so far -

“God hates lawlessness and is tireless in His desire to dissuade man from his fascination with lawlessness,” reads a paper titled “Cubby’s Talks.” ”Our hearts are lions’ dens of devouring lusts. Lawlessness torments righteous souls every day.”

Yesterday was the Junior League Attic Sale.  I honestly can’t remember the last time I did so much straight up manual labor in one day.  I moved furniture, shutters, plywood, tables, and about everything else under the sun, including a box of children’s shoes, which were pretty cute.  I have been dreading the attic sale for months.  Last saturday we had to move everything from the warehouse to the fairgrounds, and then we worked from 6-9 every night this week, and finally had to be at the fairgrounds at 6:30 yesterday morning.  None of that sounded like a lot of fun to me.  I seriously considered dropping out.  But I’ve never quit anything in my life, and I didn’t really want to start now.  But, I also hate to be a part of anything that I can’t be enthusiastic about and I hate people who have bad attitudes, and I didn’t want to be the person with the bad attitude.  So I tried to suck it up.  And you know, it did end up being fun, and I’m really glad I didn’t drop out.  It went by a lot quicker than I anticipated.  But it was a lot of work, and it was really dirty.  My elbows hurt.  And I made some friends. 

Yesterday afternoon (after a hot shower) we went to Vallartas and ate cheese dip and drank beers and margaritas and relaxed in the sunshine and it was so nice to be finished with all the hard work and it was so warm outside I was able to wear my favorite summer dress for the for time this year.  I listened to my new friends tell the stories of how they ended up in augusta and what led them to the junior league.    I convinced everyone that they wanted to come over to my new house and sit on my front porch.  It was awesome.  My sweet little house has been empty for a couple of years and it is so happy to have people to sit on it’s front porch on Saturday night.  I just hope my new neighbors are as excited as my house is. 

Speaking of my house, I’m going to go over there in a few minutes and take some pictures.  I should have taken pictures as soon as I bought it, but it was pouring down rain all last weekend and so dark, and then I’ve been at the fairgrounds all week, but today is beautiful and I want to take pictures before we paint and decorate and get everything together.  I will try to put some up so you can see the progress. 

My aching muscles and joints are having a battle with my brain.  My brain is saying, GET UP!  GO DO SOMETHING!  IT’S SO PRETTY!  YOU HAVE THINGS TO DO!  My joints and muscles are saying, PLEASE LEAVE US ALONE!  STOP ABUSING US!  WE’VE HAD ENOUGH!!

After work I went and drank champagne with Kate to celebrate the inauguration.  Kate likes to celebrate with champagne.  Someone got engaged?  We’ll drink champagne for them!  New job?  Champagne!  Birthday?  Champagne!  The moon is bright enough that you can see your shadow?  Champagne!  Pregnant?  You can watch us drink champagne!  So of course the inauguration was an EXCELLENT reason to drink champagne.  We sipped and chatted and the watched parade and the Obamas start to seize up from the cold. 

I was in the kitchen looking for something to eat when the parade finally ended and the Obamas were able to enter the White House as Mr. and Mrs. America for the first time.  When I came back into the den :

Kate:  “You missed it!  They just got home to the White House!  It was so sweet, he picked her up and carried her over the threshold and kissed her!”  

Me:   ”SHUT UP!  Back it up, I want to see that.”

Kate:  “Ha.  I’m kidding, that didn’t happen.”

Don’t believe everything your mother tells you.  Sometimes she’s just straight up lying for the shock effect. 

More than anything we wanted to see the part where Michelle took off those heels she’s had on all day long and jumped on the beds.  Cause that is the first thing I would have done.  At that point it would have been a small jump, to conserve energy.  But a jump nonetheless.

A few months ago I spilled coffee all over myself one morning, to the point where I went home and changed.  It was still early, and the only people I’d spoken with so far were Jim and Bill.  I figured, hey, boys don’t notice clothes, it’s no big deal.  The first thing Bill says when I see him later that morning – “Is that what you were wearing this morning? ” Curses. 

Briscoe has been upset with me this week.  I haven’t had time to play with her, and she’s mad about it.  She wants to go to the dog park this weekend, and has been trying to emotionally blackmail me with complaints of neglect.  What she really needs is a hair cut. 

Last night when I got home, she hauled around the house like an unhinged soul.  She kept hiding behind furniture and growling (which is her way of saying she really wants to play hid and seek – it’s a funny little growl, not like a mean growl).  So I hid behind the couch for a while and she freaked out, then I went into my room to change out of my work clothes.  When I came back out into the den about five minutes later, she was still in the game position on the other side of the room, with her butt up in the air and her head and chest on the floor.  As soon as she saw me she started growling again, signaling she wasn’t finished playing the game.  So we played some more, and she howled and ran into the wall.  So I picked her up and made her snuggle on the couch with me.  In thirty seconds she was sound asleep and purring (she has a purr like a cat – her breathing comes out in a vibrating rhythm when she is asleep, it’s hilarious). 

It’s suppose to be extremely cold this weekend.  I’m just excited that tomorrow is Friday.  We had two hearings today (three actually, but I only worked on two), and I have to say that it was a pretty interesting day.  I might have even learned something. 

Now that those hearings are over and my office has warmed up I’m getting very sleepy. 

I want to remind you all that exfoliating is an often neglected joy in life.  It’s very important in the bitter days of winter. 

Y’all know how I hate birds?  This is a good example of why – http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/plane-crashes-into-hudson-river/?hp

Britt:  WHOA!  That is a huge book!

Me:  Yep, I like big books.  This is a children’s novel.

Britt:  What is it?

Me:  His Dark Materials, you know, the Golden Compass. 

Britt:  Wait, I think I read something in a church bulletin that said you shouldn’t read that book or let your kids go see the movie.  Something about it being satanic.  Is it satanic?

Me:  That’s what I’m trying to figure out.  As far as I can tell, it is a children’s novel set in a fictional world, where an entity similarly structured as the church is evil.  Personally, I would compare it to 1984, where the government is evil.  I mean, it was written by an atheist.  But there seem to be some good moral themes.  It obviously is going to come down to good vs. evil.  We’ll see. 

____

Dan over at the Pasty Quail has been covering the Golden Compass debate, and I think it is really interesting.  I really like what he has to say here.  I strongly disagree with any organization that wants to tell me what I can and can’t read, or what I should and shouldn’t watch.  Why don’t churches worry about movies full of violence and hate and the kind of evilness that really and truly does exist in this world, instead of waging war against a STORY about an IMAGINARY place?

I haven’t read the whole thing.  So maybe I’ll feel differently about it when I get finished.  But I somehow doubt that a lot of people who are against this book and movie have read it.  I personally have more faith in my own faith than to be threatened by a novel.  Especially not a novel who heroes and heroines refuse to break their sworn promises, and who fight for the innocent, and whose actions are compassionate and heartfelt.  Because that is what I have gotten out of the book so far. 

But, you know, maybe it becomes satanic later on.  I would like to be a part of a church that encouraged children to read the book, or see the movie, and then initiate a discussion about how the "church" or the "god" in the book is different from the Church and the God that we believe in.  My mom said that some people don’t like the idea that people can be moralistic even if they aren’t religious.  But that is just a fact of life, right? 

I’m not sure why this whole thing bothers me so much, but I really don’t like the whole controversy.  I think part of it stems from the fact that it irritates me when people talk about Harry Potter being evil, and even some people think Lord of the Rings is negative, which is really amazing to me. 

There are over 500 facebook groups about the Golden Compass as of today.  Most of them are titled – DO NOT GO SEE THE GOLDEN COMPASS, or BOYCOTT THE GOLDEN COMPASS or THE GOLDEN COMPASS AND IT’S ATTACK ON CHRISTIANITY (wtf?) 

I particularly like – BOYCOTT THE GOLDEN COMPASS AND IT’S ATHEIST MESSAGE.  Really, I would say there appears to be more hate in these groups than in the book that I’ve been reading. 

I want to join the group – YOU KNOW WHAT YOU RELIGIOUS BIGOTS?  I JUST MIGHT GO SEE THE GOLDEN COMPASS.   or maybe – READING THE GOLDEN COMPASS DID NOT MAKE ME AN ATHEIST.

Really, I could spend hours going through these facebook groups.  But I don’t have time.  I need to go finish my novel.  I’m intrigued, and entertained, and challenged by it. 

from the article –

The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

As I child, I was a nerd.  I spent a lot of time in my room by myself reading books.  I spent a lot of time in public reading books. I was also terribly hyperactive.  Basically, if I was sitting still, my nose was probably in a book.  I’m not sure how it works for a hyperactive attention deficit child to be a compulsive reader, but it just happened to be the only time I was able to focus.  I think it had to do with my overactive imagination and the fact that I was (and still am) captivated by stories.  Books were my escape from my everyday life of losing things, breaking stuff, and being reprimanded by adults. 

I think I was made fun of for reading so much.  I don’t really remember, because I was a pretty unaffected child, and probably didn’t really care.  My love for reading far outweighed any sort of social stigma I might have experienced. 

The first time I because cognizant that my reading habits had been the subject of ridicule was in high school.  Because in high school we started taking standardized tests like the SAT.  And I was good at these tests.  And friends started saying things like, "Well, I guess we shouldn’t have made fun of you for reading so much when we were little."  Even parents would say things like, "You sure showed us, even though we used to pick on you for reading all the time, you have the last laugh with your SAT score."  And honestly my score wasn’t anything for the record books, but I did well early in high school, it never got a lot better, but I took the tests early which for some reason seemed to make them more impressive than they actually were. 

But my first thought with these comments was – "Huh? Y’all were making fun of me?  I don’t remember that."  And "I wonder if reading really is the way to do well on standardized tests."  And I’ve sort of been wondering about that ever since. 

And so I thought this article was really interesting.  Obviously, if reading doesn’t bring you pleasure, you aren’t going to read for pleasure.  So it isn’t really fair to say that if you want to do well you should read.  Because, well, the advantage is probably in the margin of people who actually read ALL THE TIME for YEARS.  So, I think you really need the love.  But, anyway, thought it was an interesting article. 

Also wanted to talk about this article on Denial - but don’t have time.  Love the topic of denial.  Think it is really fascinating. 

So, just thought I would share a few things with y’all.  I recently purchased the Colbie Caillat CD, and I highly recommend it.  It is definitely girl music, but it is upbeat and soothing, sort of something you can tune out, but good lyrics too.  I like it. My favorites are Oxygen and Midnight Bottle. 

I also recently purchased the Luke Bryan CD – he is from Albany, Ga, and is fun.  He wrote Billy Currington’s song – Good Directions, and I think this is his first CD.  It makes me happy.  My favorite songs are We Rode in Trucks and You Make Me Want To.   

Travers says I listen to terrible music.  Who asked him anyway?

I’ve recently found a few new websites that I like a lot –

The Pasty Quail – this is site run by a few law students at UGA.  Lots of interesting articles and outside links with blurbs.  I was thoroughly entertained. 

Walking to the Shops Damages the Planet More than Going by Car – I love this article.  Honestly – I’m all about the environment, I really am, but most people don’t even think through the real impact of their actions – and what might seem "good" is sometimes "bad", or, simply, "not good". 

Binge Drinking is Good For You – I just thought this article was hilarious.  I mean – it doesn’t have a real serious point, but it made me laugh.  I like columnists.  Especially British ones.

Oh, and speaking of substance abuse – if it ever comes down to it – please send me to this Rehab.  I feel at peace in the mountains.   

And last but not least – what I think of as the funniest SNL skit I’ve ever seen, starring Lindsey – who has been lucky enough to go to rehab at the Cirque Lodge –