Today, I spent, quite literally, the entire day in bed reading.
We were supposed to go to the fields and work in the chacras but when my host father came home from feeding the bulls at 7am completely drunk (no, I don’t know how he does it), I realized that wasn’t going to happen. And when his 70 year old sister came over shortly after to castigate him for his drunkiness I shut my door and decided it was best not to come out until the coast was clear. Turns out, the coast wasn’t clear for about 12 hours.
I would think that this would bother me. Like when I was staying in the municipality hostal: I felt like I was locked in a little cave, shut off from the world. Trapped. But today, miraculously, I didn’t feel that at all. I have built myself a tiny life-sustaining vessel that can take me anywhere. My room made me feel anything but locked today. I finished a book where David Sedaris comically describes his journey in Japan, and began a Dave Egger’s description of an attempt to empty his weighted pockets in Senegal. I could have done the four hours worth of laundry piled up by my door or more fully developed Week 4 of my curriculum, but instead I read.
It is funny how I am constantly talking to kids about reading for fun and how important it is, and yet I never do it. I remember deciding right around middle school that it was time to stop reading those silly mystery novels and use my time more wisely. If I was going to take the time to read, I might as well make it useful. I shifted to old classics or pop psych but then during free time in college found myself reading books titled “Poverty and Child Brain Development” or the Cognitive Psychology Journal. Yup, a journal. While it is all well and good, fascinating and inspirational, where did the joy of reading vanish to? Where was the pick up a book instead of a DVD? Since graduating from college I have allowed myself, for the first time in about a decade, to read anything. And right now, I am high off of it. Knocking silly books out left and right and letting the pile of 30cent pirated DVDs sit on their shelf next to Simone de Beuvoir and Jon Kabat-Zinn.
The next step: get a lock for the inside of my door. I have a huge padlock for when I leave, but have no way to secure the door from the inside. So my little Lu-made boat can take me anywhere, and I really can’t be bothered, we are going to need a hook-n-eye.
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