Day #8069 - Book Binge

For those of you out there who once upon a time may have been English majors, the term "word vomit" is probably not something new. For those of you who weren't, allow me to elaborate. Word vomit is more or less just writing whatever is in your head on a topic, whatever random ideas whether they work together or not. This is a common occurrence among writers pulling an all-nighter, realizing that the paper assigned a few weeks ago is due in a few hours. For others this could just be a natural part of their writing process, wanting to get all their ideas down first, then moving them around and making more sense of them later via editing.

However, this weekend I've been experiencing what could best be described as a book binge - rather than writing everything down as fast as I can and hardly allowing time for anything to process, I've been having to read so quickly that there hasn't been much time to enjoy it and only taking enough time where the stories can sink in for when I need to discuss them in class this coming week. For my children's lit class, I've read three out of the four assigned novels for the week in the last few days. Two alone I read yesterday, one of which was a Newberry Honor winner and I had to sprint through it in a matter of hours. I'm about to jump into my fourth novel of the weekend, but knowing I need to metaphorically inhale it by Wednesday afternoon on top of the other homework and projects that need my attention, it just feels wrong. These authors probably spent months or maybe even years writing these books, and I'm only taking a few hours with each one before needing to move on.

I guess this is all a roundabout way of commenting on time-management, though that honestly isn't what I was going for. I make to-do lists every day and consider myself to have very strong time-management skills. Yet there are always days like today when it feels like there's still more to be done than I'll ever have time for. So yes, sometimes sprinting through tasks is a necessary evil, but we should all do the best we can to recognize that pausing is sometimes just as necessary. You don't always have to stop and smell the roses, and if there's just not enough time to stop, at least take a moment to think about how remarkable the things we take for granted actually are.