In Which The Non-Indigenous Stick Together

Everything that is wrong with me can be chalked up to not drinking enough water and not reading enough good fiction.

I proved the water theory by making an active effort to drink lots of water the other day and it cured at least one thing that was wrong with me (I won't get into too much detail about this, let's just say Doretta's mom would also have a solution to offer). Drinking water all day also cured me of obsessively making and eating snacks all day (goddamn you Trader Joe's endless varieties of trail mix!).

On the fiction front, well, I gave up reading a while back. A year plus. I remember meeting my Swedish friend Mikaela's brother several years ago. He was on some kind of straight-edge stint that Swedish kids apparently do sometime in their late teens. No drinkee, no smokee, no meatee, no humpee. I guess this is for cleansing the spirit? Or teaching you that you can live without all these things, that these things are privileges to be enjoyed in a mature fashion. It's a healthy thought, this sort of monkish abstinence in the middle of what, for most people in the modern Western world, is some variation of a head-first swan dive into a pile of the dangerously yummy stuff.

Anyway, I've been reading like an alcoholic sucking on a bottle since I learned how. There's a particularly touching photo of me as a small person in pigtails sitting on the can (thanks to a plastic seat insert to keep my small bottom from falling into the bowl) and concentrating on Richard Scarry's "Busy People" (a misnomer really, aren't they all animals?) which spread out on my lap and takes up all the space from my hips to my ankles. Anyway, from that point until last year, at any given time, I'd usually have about four books on the go. During my English Literature degree, I could hardly wait for the summer so that I could leave off reading Thomas Hardy novels and do whatever I wanted with my free time (read Virginia Woolf, at it turns out).

Then I went a-traveling for a couple months and though I brought books, I ended up reading only Nicholson Baker's "U & I" and part of John Fowles' "The Tree", both very short and both non-fiction, an undiscovered country for me. Shortly after this, I discarded fiction in favour of non and then gave up on reading altogether.

But I just can't stop being literary, even in the middle of movie school. I mean, come on, did you catch the Hamlet reference above? It just slips out! I've decided to return to the fold. I read Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach over winter break, which I'd been meaning to read for years. I just finished re-reading Pride and Prejudice, and gawwwwwww-lly if that Jane Austen isn't still as amusing and piquant as ever. I'm onto Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor (Sinead's brother? So I heard). I'm hoping the rib-sticking stories will weave their subtle patterns around me and give me the ballast to find the same nuance in film tale-telling.

So, that'll be me, in the false-front, confectionary world of Los Angeles, I'll be the one weighed down with a massive tome and a jug of Adam's ale. Hey, it's no backpack of reference texts, but it'll do.