LaughAtlantis

On my not-particularly-crowded bus home today, no fewer than four people were reading 'Harry Potter and the Deathly What-Whats.' Wow.

I realized something recently. For whatever reason, I don't do the 'light summer reading' thing. For the past three years I have set a goal for myself of how many books I want to read in a given year, and inevitably I'm going along just fine until about mid-May, when it all goes out the window. I can read light fluffy crap all winter and then late spring hits, the books get thicker, the content gets heavier, the prose gets denser, and the time it takes to complete a tome triples.

Examples:
In the past two months or so I have read (among other things) 'Middlesex' (Jeffrey Eugenides), 'Devil in the White City' (Erik Larsen), 'Nineteen Minutes' (Jodi Picoult), 'The Historian' (Elizabeth Kostova), 'Everything Is Illuminated' (Jonathan Safran Foer), and 'Lake of Dead Languages' (Carol Goodman). These are big and heavy and I read most of them in hardcover, dragging them with me to and from on the bus each day.

Comparatively, in February I read (among others) 'California Demon' (Julie Kenner), 'With Red Hands' (Stephen Woodworth), 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress' (Brendan Halpin), 'Picking Up' (Kate Fenton), and shame of shames, 'His Wicked Ways (Samantha James). Two day reads, tops, all of them. And one of them is a freakin' romance novel. Kill me now. ( I read it based on a friend's recommendation. I will no longer be taking her advice on literary matters.)

So now I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. I want to read the new Harry Potter, all 784 pages of it. But I read the last two right when they came out, so that's a while back, and I have read easily two hundred books in between now and HP5. So I am faced with re-reading two HP 5 & 6, two giganto-books, before I move on to Deathly Hallows - by which point everyone in the world will probably have spilled some vital spoiler to me.

Sigh. Damn my parents for making me love reading so much.

I really wanted to go to the Police concert at Fenway Park, but there was no way I was going to spend $95 on a ticket - not to mention, how much fun is a concert when you go alone, anyway? Rod knew how much I wanted to go though, so when the Weekly Dig sent out an email offering up a free pair of tickets, he fired back immediately with an email stating, "Did I win? My life would me me forever." The Dig was happy to give him the tickets, on the condition that I provide email testimonial that I would indeed love him forever. Here is my reply...

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My husband would like me to attest to the fact that Police tickets would make me love him forever. The truth is this:

Rod and I have been married for three and a half years. He has not done a single load of laundry in that time. Despite the fact that we have an old, slightly infirm basset hound, Rod has only managed to pick up dog poop off our back porch twice. His hairline has receded, his waistline has expanded, he has stopped wearing his contacts, and his beard is more scruff than anything else. On top of that, I can't drive, I'm asthmatic, and I only have one lung, yet as you can see by his email below, Rod would rather have me walk to your offices than be inconvenienced on his comfy drive to work, the rat bastard.

But if he could get us free tickets to see The Police... wow. That would not just make me love him forever, it would actually make me forgive him for a lot of that stuff I just revealed. (Except the dog poop. There's just no forgiving that.)

So please, consider our request for Police tickets. You could indeed cause eternal bliss... and make make me blind to baldness. Quite impressive, really.
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The Dig apparently really liked my response because they now want to use it in their marketing stuff, as a "we'll give stuff away free but you may have to jump through hoops to get it" fun ploy.

I like being funny.