Love Affair

I love to read. Pretty much anything with words I'll read.

I think I remember how it started. I was really really young, I forget the age, but definitely before Kindergarten. Anyways, my dad always listened to talk radio. And one of the ads was a program to learn a foreign language. I forget the language that I desperately wanted learn, but my dad was like, "well you can't really learn a foreign language that way until you can read." I remember replying, "Daddy I want to learn how to read! Now!" Soon after, my dad had purchased all of these really simple books, and before you know it, I was in class, my teachers at my daycare teachers staring at me in disbelief as I read books like "The Cat and the Hat", and "Green Eggs & Ham", with little or even no help at all. I think that's when my love affair of the written word began.

My parents raised me very strict (thank god!), or at least at the time I though so. I wasn't really allowed to watch TV (which at the time I absolutely hated). I couldn't watch TV on school nights, on Fridays & Saturdays, I could watch two hours, but not past 10pm. Sundays I could watch an hour and a half. In addition to all that. On Fridays after school, I had to turn in a TV schedule for the weekend (which detailed which shows I was watching, the time and what channel it was on). This went on until high school, 9th grade I could watch TV on the weekends, and eventually I used good grades to allow me to watch TV anytime I wanted.

As you can tell, this left me with plenty of free time. Free time to read! I would read anything. I used to have this plastic bookshelf stuffed with all types of books, from the Babysitters's Club, Sweet Valley Twins, Kiddy Novels, Goosebumps, and tons of Magazines (not like Teen Bop with pictures of Usher and Hanson either, like substantial Mags ). I was a really fast reader, so fast my mom actually declared to stop buying books and made me get a library card. Which is another story of its own, because, ESPECIALLY in the summer, for the summer reading club, I would reach the end and get all of the prizes so early on, I would go up to the library, "okay what's next?!"

Needless to say I had an addiction. I snuck books into class and read under my desk when the teacher wasn't looking, a bedtime I read by nightlight, I read in the tub, on the toilet. In high school I was pretty much obsessed with every book that was assigned to us (well, except for the Scarlet Letter, and Beowulf....*barf*)

Then college. I took two African-American Lit classes. And my reading assignments pretty much trumped everything again. As I my life experiences changes, my preferences in reading changed to, I started liking, biographies (Miep Gies is my favorite), mysteries (Mary Higgins Clark), and of course THE CLASSICS (The Brontë Sisters, Austen, Dumas, Dostoevsky, Huxley, etc, everything get the picture?

In short, I've really become appreciative for my ability to read. If it wasn't for the things I learn from them, the places that they take me, or experiences that I get to experience, I don't know where would I be and who would I be now. Books and my love of literature in some ways have gotten me though some pretty tough stuff, those ugly teenage girl years every girl tries to suppress, boredom, madness, sadness, insanity, foolishness, and currently helping me get through what I think is my first broken heart.

Don't take the simple things for granted. I volunteer at a homeless shelter and witness firsthand that even though the literacy rate in the USA, is 99% (CIA World Factbook) there are plenty of adults who cannot read or write.

Take Pride and Be thankful for the smallest things <3