A Lucky Addiction

Wow!  Has it been 5 days since the last post?  Well, time flies when you have the blahs.  Which I do.  Big-time.  It hasn't helped that I'm back at work, getting caught up, going through piles and piles of things and writing out tons of forms.  Also I had a competition of something I coach, and we did well enough, I suppose.  I was given a plaque, too, which is not only very nice--but the plaque and inscription also look very nice.  'cuz I'm materialistic and shallow like that.  But the whole thing was a good time.

Now...back to writing.  Getting caught up at work, and going back to work (after the bereavement leave), really took its toll on me, to the extent that I haven't written much, read much, or slept much, for that matter.  When I've been reading, it's been Mary Karr's Lit.  I don't know why I decided to start at the end--which normally in a trilogy is a very, very bad thing to do--but I read a bit of the others and actually made the decision to start at the third.  Odd, I know, but my reasoning is that I wasn't in the mood to read about self-destructive sexual escapades (Cherry) and I wasn't in the mood to read about parents who screw up her entire childhood (The Liar's Club).  And what I'd read, at random, of Lit was better than what I'd read, at random, of The Liar's Club, so I stuck with it.  Why?  Because I'd had--and may still have--a very heavy case of the blahs, and I didn't really give a damn, though I knew that I should have.  Which is a textbook definition of the blahs, by the way.

And when you're feeling like that, and something--blessed, effin' anything--is working, you stick with it.  Because it makes you feel something akin to happy.  Because you don't screw with anything, no matter how small, that's working when you're feeling like this, because you never know if anything else is going to.  And, well, because.  That's why.  Just...because.  When you're feeling like this, that really is a good enough reason.

Having said this, I realized that reading (and writing, I suppose) has been there for me through many episodes of the blahs, most of them much deeper and more profound than this one.  While reading is undoubtedly an escape, one could say the same for alcohol and drugs, and reading is by far the cheapest and least destructive of the three.  If you're gonna be addicted to something that obliterates the void, it might as well be a turning of the pages.  I am lucky to have this addiction.