Do you ever feel like your brain is slowly wasting away? As it if had atrophy? Sometimes I truly believe this is happening to me. Really! I can recall times when I felt genuinely smarter than I do right now. My vocabulary was greater, I remembered how to spell words, and did not second guess myself on diction and sentence structure. There are people in this world (Warren) who remember most of what they learn and there are people who lose skills from not using them (me). I can be quite studious when taking classes and score rather well, but I will not remember anything that I've learned unless I use those learned skills. My sister barely pays attention in any class and still remembers everything. I'm not sure exactly how that makes any sense. Sometimes I think the theory of osmosis really works in her case because she falls asleep reading all the time.
And on to reading! I used to read all the time. Really. I know it's strange sounding now. I read the same books over and over in high school and still enjoyed them. I read the books that I was supposed to read in college and enjoyed them, too. No idea where that part of me went, but I rarely read anything for pleasure anymore. I can't even remember the last book that I read purely for pleasure. We had a game at church the other day and my question was "What is your favorite book", and the only books that popped into my head were books on autism or child-rearing for special needs children. Seriously, in what world would those be considered a favorite book? Those are mainly educational. Now I could have said the Bible, but honestly, that kind of answer seems trite in church and not really realistic. I would categorize that as more educational as well. So much of me seems absorbed by gaining information that I seem to be losing information. Does that make any sense at all? It sometimes feels like my brain just can not hold any more information, so it decides to "brain dump" bits and pieces of knowledge along the way in order to make room for more. If I could just learn to purge my brain of all useless knowledge... that would be fantastic. :)
This year for a New Year's resolution I decided that since reading really makes me happy, I would go to bed early every night and read a chapter of some book I wanted to finish. Well, I got 1/4 through Going Rogue and then got too tired and busy to keep up. Anyway, was amused since you were wondering when you had last read a book for pure pleasure. Saturday I started a book entitled "Pure Pleasure" by Gary Thomas (same guy who wrote Sacred Marriage that Emily recently blogged about). It analyzes how Christians often come to think of pleasure as sinful rather than seeing how God is pleased when we are and created things for our pleasure and to reject that we are in a sense saying that Christ's sacrifice wasn't enough. Anyway, it's a good book and I hope you'll allow yourself the luxury of reading for pleasure again soon (and perhaps pregnancy brain has something to do with the brain dump).
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