There's nothing like uprooting yourself from your home of 20 years, moving 3000 miles away, and starting a new job to teach you a thing or two about preconceived notions. It has been a little over a year and I'm sure you'll all be shocked and amazed by the revelations I've had since I've moved here.
Some people just don't read.
The guy who sits next to me at work has been riding motorcycles for about ten years, and at one point he asked me if I had read a particular publication on the subject of maintaining a bike. He didn't quite remember the title, but he described the content sufficiently for me to realize that he was talking about the venerable Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. When I gave him the correct title, he was all set to go out and buy it until he realized that it was a book. A novel. With multiple hundreds of pages. And apparently that ruled it out. It was "too long."
I come from a literary household, and I've been spoiled by parents who wholeheartedly support the love of reading in their children. My neighbors also all read prodigiously. My mom was in a book club. And in college, my housemates traded books back and forth so often they were almost a form of currency. The only time before now that I ever encountered anyone who didn't read was when I was in high school and one of the football jocks who loved nothing more than making fun of me caught me reading a short novel and said he had never read something that long in his life. But he was pond scum anyway and I didn't really count his existence as part of the human race.
So to come across a highly successful, master's degree-holding professional who refuses to tackle books... it just doesn't bear thinking about. And yes I'm a snob, and I think less of him because of it.
Some people make it to adulthood without knowing how to use medical tape.
This one is probably just a product of my own childhood love affair with dangerous and punishing sports, but really... how on earth does anyone go through life without ever abusing themselves to the point-
...If I were to be completely honest with myself, I might admit that it is...unusual...to grow up with a father who has both a very strong first aid background and a penchant for creating situations in which he needs to take advantage of it (somewhere we have an unopened VHS of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was a gift to my dad after a series of these "situations"). And maybe, just maybe, gymnastics isn't a normal childhood sport (although it was in my neighborhood). Critics might further submit that taking up track at the same time as competitive gymnastics might be unhealthy. Whatever.
One of my very good friends just got a scooter, and he recently mentioned that he's having a lot of wrist problems because of the angle of the handle bars. So one day I dropped off a roll of tape at his desk. And he sent me a very nice message thanking me and also confessing that he had no idea how to use this mystical roll of white sticky fabric. I schlepped back over to his desk, wrapped his wrist, showed him some wrist stretches, and marveled at the fact that he had heretofore kept his body in such pristine condition.
Some people write books that are only meant to be read once.
I've spoken before of my bookshelves. The reason they're so full is because I've still got books that I bought ten years ago, and the reason I still keep them is because I still read them from time to time. This is just the way it is with me and books. If it's good enough to read once, it's good enough to read again. And again. And maybe once or twice more for good measure. And then, you know how it is, you remember some point that Heinlein made about why we laugh at pain in Stranger in a Strange Land, but you don't remember what it was and you're pretty sure that the second half of that paragraph is really important, so you keep it on hand to reference from time to time, even though you've grown up a bit since the first time you read it and you realize your former literary hero was actually a rampant chauvinist and homophobe (and then you were in Italy and you had brought along his The Book of Job because, hey, it's Heinlein, and you were so disgusted you left it in the hotel).
This is why I have no problem sinking small fortunes into books. I make them work for their keep.
The point is that I read a lot of fiction, and typically it's fiction that is not set in the present. It's just as relevant (or irrelevant, I suppose) now as it was the day it was published. And it will continue to retain a constant level of relevance for the next ten years.
I've begun to tentatively stick a toe into the pool of non-fiction, and I have a really hard time with it. I'm reading things that are barely important now, and in two years will be kindling. One read sucks the book dry of any useful properties, and there's no reason to keep it around beyond that.
...although I secretly suspect that these books, so glutted with the here and now, will be amusingly instructive in about seven years time. I've got The New New Thing keeping company with a few other literary snapshots of the present, and I think I'm going to create a small book time capsule.
I don't know if anyone still reads this, but if you do, I really want to hear about what sort of eye opening experiences you had along these lines.
