About a week ago an important question arose on FaceBook. Well, maybe not that important. Someone wanted to know if something mentioned in a Godzilla movie was actually from Japanese legend or just made up for the film. I happened to have run across a similar legend years ago, and I knew exactly which book it was in in my huge book collection. Unfortunately, I didn't know where it might lie in my piles and piles of books, magazines, DVDs and papers. I looked in closets and in boxes and under the sink and in cabinets, and it took me three days to find the right volume. By then the world had moved on to other pressing questions.
"I've been in this apartment for four months," I said to myself, "and it still looks like I've just stepped in and dumped everything on the floor!" So I spent a long hard weekend stacking books into columns by subject (so I will at least know to look in the Science pile, the Myth and Legend pile, etc.), boxed up magazines and comics, crammed DVDs into unused cabinet space, and put bill stubs, Xerox copies, and various important papers into manila folders. I slowed down during the work-week, but by Friday night I was amazed -- my apartment looked rather neat (as near as my tiny one-bedroom place can, with so much stuff packed in it).
Then -- around 10:30 PM I picked up a magazine at random and actually started reading. Even including more than eight hours of sleep, I was halfway through the magazine by 9:00 AM. Then I started reading one of my intimidatingly long volumes . . . and opened a few of my collectible comic books and actually read them . . . and pulled out a random manila folder and read the clippings within . . . and I even took out some stories of my own and reviewed them. This reading (and writing) thing might just get to be a habit, at least I hope so!
