I Skipped It

I so cheated and didn't post last night. I was planning on posting last night...instead I went to my aunt's usual New Year's Eve shindig, which was neither shin-y nor dig-y. It was as it always is: cousins, aunts, uncles, kids and food all wrapped up in a very noisy package. It wasn't a super-big party (we're not the big-partying type of folk). I tried to read, and I managed to read a bit. A friend of the family was there watching some of my cousins playing Guitar Hero (on a side note, I was impressed when I saw "Holiday in Cambodia" listed as a song to play on that game). He wondered aloud "Doesn't anybody read anymore?" to which I held up my book. He had an expression of thankfulness that at least someone still reads. I wanted to tell him that there are a lot of us readers in the world, just not a lot of them in my family. So I continued to read on the couch, read for awhile and fell asleep. I woke up a little before 11:00 and went home to go to bed. I slept through the ridiculous midnight ball-dropping nonsense. It was so nice and quiet sleeping in my cozy bed. I should do that EVERY year!!!

Slacker

Yes, I'm a total slacker. I never blogged last night. I was way too tired to even think, let alone write. Oh well...I'm sure the internet did fine without me.

I'm rather annoyed right now. I've been reading a book (which will remain nameless) for nearly a month now. Normally, it does not take me this long to read a book unless it's uninteresting, exceedingly long or I have no time to read other than a minute or two here and there. This book is fairly short, fairly interesting and I've had enough time that I should've finished it by now. The problem I'm having with this book is twofold: First, I really want to start reading the book my friend gave me for Christmas; second, while the book is interesting, it strays far off its proposed topic. It's a non-fiction book concerning Eastern philosophy. I'm intrigued by Eastern philosophical ideas (namely Taoism) and thought it would be a good book to get my feet wet, as it were. However, instead of focusing on Taoism, the author uses the book as a soapbox from which he spews forth his own socio-ecological-political philosophies and beliefs. I don't mind reading that type of material, but for the love of all that is holy the man needed to NOT write it under the ruse of Taoist ideas. In the beginning of the book, the principles mentioned and examples used did mesh rather well. Yet less than a third of the way through, the author started going so far off-topic with whatever aspect of the human race that was pissing him off at the moment that it made little to no sense when he finally did circle back to the subject of the chapter. I mean really, if I'd wanted to hear about how the government sucks or how we're raping the natural world, etc., I'd talk to some of my neo-hippie friends or go to Ithaca or something. I really wanted to read a book that would help introduce me to Taoism, not a 257-page rant about how much the Republican administration of the eighties and early nineties sucked....TELL ME SOMETHING I DON'T KNOW!!! I guess I'm going to have to find something else to slake my learning thirst.