We used to tease my mother-in-law for her preferred mode of weekend entertainment. It consisted mostly of watching movies with little to no dialogue, but brimming over with blood, gore and broken limbs. She explained that she did not care to think in her moments of repose, which would have been the case if she were to watch fiction of the verbose sort.
While, in the interest of maintaining my digestive peace, I still question her choice of genre, I no longer wonder at her reason. I understand her now. After a week of slaving over soul-crushing cubicle work that is the demand of necessity rather than interest, and dealing, in a personal and professional capacity, with the mind-boggling angst and nonsense of a constant stream of bipeds in arrested emotional maturity, it is too much to require additional strenuous mental exercise on a rest day.
I understand her even better because I find myself in the same situation, stretched so thin by the demands of full time employment and parenthood that I refuse to use my brain a second over Friday’s sunset, by which time I demand my inalienable right to nonsensical rest and recreation.
In my case, I find my comfort in my trove of books, but while my younger tastes leaned towards the likes of Poe, Kafka, Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky, I now find myself in need of much, much lighter fare, so utterly bereft of depth that I am ashamed to admit the crime of reading them, and am therefore constrained to hide the evidence in the bowels of a nondescript eBook reader.
But even then, the lack of spare brain cells to process even my dumbed down diversions requires me to reread sentences thrice before I comprehend their import, an affliction first manifested by my own mother, who, paradoxically, has a degree in English Literature. This has led me to the conclusion that mothers aren’t, by nature, slow or uncomprehending. We’re just tired!
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| (Thanks Rocky for sharing this. >:D) |
Now the question is, shall this be the permanent prevailing state of affairs? To that I say, I refuse defeat. After two months with my eBook reader, I have been forcing my grey matter to gradually migrate, cell by cell, back to its usual haunts: Tolkien, Dickens, Eliot, Chekhov, Hemingway… God help me.
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