Enough time

I was thinking to myself, "Remember that time I wanted to read 100 books in a year (but then had to settle for 50)? And I blogged about it? I should do that again, and I should start a SubStack to write about the books". 

But why start a SubStack when I have a perfectly good Blogger.com blog already set up? The same blog, in fact, where I had already logged (blogged?) the 100 50 Books Project over a decade ago.

So I am taking this blog off the shelf and dusting it off; that's 14 years of dust! Enough time to move house five times, finish a bachelor's degree, get a PhD, change careers, get married, and then separate (we haven't divorced). Enough time to develop a smartphone addiction, enough time to decide to beat it, and enough time to buy a bunch of books because you are tired of Big Tech* worming into your brain and deciding what you pay attention to 24/7, and what you think about when when you are not looking at your stupid little screen. The plan behind the books being, obviously, that you will read those books instead of scrolling.**

Enough time, in short, to now be the average mid-30s person.

After I decided not to open a new blog and instead use the old one, I went back and clicked randomly through the archives. Enough time has passed that I had forgotten many of the things I wrote about, but it's weird that I can tell I wrote them. Enough time has passed, too, that it's no longer cringey to me. Instead I read what I wrote and just find it funny, as if someone else had written them, and that person just happens to share an inside joke or two with me. 

After clicking through the blog I logged in to write this entry, and found a bunch of abandoned draft posts. A good portion of them seem to be written from the bottom of the Pit Of Despair, sponsored by my PhD. My knee-jerk reaction is to NOT read those drafts, because it has not been Enough Time. It also seems that at some point I went back and un-published some entries which I might have found embarrassing. I am trusting my previous self's judgement and also decided not to read those now-drafts.

I turned 34 last week and was suddenly gripped by the impulse to have Some Projects. You know, "I did X every day for a year", or "Doing 5000 pull-ups this year", or... something. I suppose my project for age 33 turned out to be a triple whammy: go back to therapy, end the marriage, finally learn what I should have already known about taxes & savings. So, you know, all good stuff; but it would be nice to actually plan something for 34 instead of suddenly realizing I'm having an emotional crisis and dealing with it on the fly****. 

And I've been chipping away at my screen time / book balance for a few weeks already, and thought, why not formalize it? This is one place where I will choose to funnel my energy.

Anyway.

Anyway...

Anyway, I really had no reason to write this piece at all, because I haven't finished my first book since turning 34. But maybe I can cheat a bit, and write about some books I finished in the past few weeks, when I was a 33 year old child. I'll write about those next; but in the meantime, I'm using this post to metaphorically clear my throat.

Also, I'm not proofreading this. I don't think I have the mental energy just now.

* Tired of Big Tech, but also hoping my Big Tech stock does well because I'd like to retire, please.

** Books are morally superior to short videos. No, just kidding. Obviously I thought about why books > reels; besides the slower rate of information consumption, you have more control about what to read*** i.e. what ideas you choose to think about. And also I remembered with nostalgia staying up until 2 AM in my bedroom at my parents' house because I just couldn't put my book down. Granted that book was probably Confessions of a Shopaholic and not Anna Karenina... but a book is a book is a book, I guess? And books are morally superior to short videos... (Da Capo al Fine!).

*** Obviously our book choices are also affected by algorithms-- what books you hear about or find at a bookshop -- but these algorithms will be enough levels removed to be acceptable (not that one has much choice).

**** Only this isn't my first rodeo, so my grownup version of dealing with a crisis on the fly was to write an email to my old therapist from my grownup work computer, and then have some grownup conversations with a few people, and figure things out calmly and without judgement.