Jean's post about how her parents did not think fiction was appropriate reading material got me thinking about how I got sucked into the written word. As long as I can remember, I have this image of my dad reading something: the newspaper, Time magazine, the latest New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, or American Family Physician, or dime-store type paperback spy novels. If he wasn't watching TV, he was reading, and sometimes he would do both—the book/magazine/or paper would get him through the interminable commercial breaks. It's obvious that this impacted me greatly.

There was a portentuous sense of destiny this evening, despite the dead part of my soul realizing that it meant nothing. All my aspirations have ended in dust. It makes little sense that this would be any different now.

Reading random blog posts, I find this sentence incredibly sad:

Another day off pissed away. Not to mention a couple hundred flushed down a couple dollar slot machines.

The number of single friends I have continues to diminish.

Don’t give up? Please don’t patronize me.

Frighteningly, there actually is a biological process that explains the correlation between bookishness and wearing glasses. (The rest of the chain of events that cements one's social standing as a nerd is a conjectural adventure into psychology which I would rather not take…)