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Date A Girl Who Reads; or what an odd thing to find when you’re on a break…
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.
Rosemary Urquico
Why I ♥ Flock, and later, Orwell for a day
I’m not one to shamelessly advocate for anything, in fact I’d rather go for what I percieve to be the underdog. But I have to say, Flock has to be the best browser everrr. Yeah. It’s the one browser that’s grabbed me by my nostrils and thrust me into web 2.0. And it was simple, plain and non-invasive (save the nostrils bit, though we came to an agreement, I wouldn’t sue). It made stuff I’d shied away from fun. like blogging. And while there’s other browsers out there that I’ve used and advocated for, this one takes the cake. plus it’s so social that I’m considering a foray into the dark and dingy alleys of my MySpace account. It just makes the web feel that much more clean and blue and safe. And mine. let’s not forget that.
So aside from the general suckiness of being made to stay home, I have the net, a welcome distraction, where I can just sit and look at randomly generated stuff. Plus i’m up to date with all the webcomics I’m following, which is awesome… I’ve fixed and upgraded the home computer, so it’s going to go on for ever… Ok, no, for a very long time. Ok, no, for like the next year or so. then it’s going to get tweaked again. Vicious cycle. But technology is one of those things, it keeps going for its own sake.
I’m disturbed by the number of people that have absolutely no idea who George Orwell is, or rather Eric Arthur Blair. I’m reading 1984 and acknowledging that this guy was genius.
Him, the genius
So the guy that gave us 1984 isn’t that well known, fine. How about Animal Farm? That’s the book that gave us all the ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’ quote. He’s the guy that broke down the Soviet empire into easy-to-understand characters, he’s the one that saw that communism is about the biggest hoax there is… But noone knows who he is. Sad. He’s the guy that breaks down what it was like to be a colonial soldier in Burma, he asks why the English language is, he went down a coal mine and wrote everything exactly as he saw it. He was, by far, one of the greatest literary minds of the last century.
But then again, we don’t read. We’re told. So now I’ve told you. Go look him up…
