Today's book, "Millions of Americans know and love Amy Dickinson from reading her syndicated advice column "Ask Amy" and from hearing her wit and wisdom weekly on National Public Radio. This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the people who helped raise them after Amy found herself a reluctant single mother. Though divorce runs through her family like an aggressive chromosome, the women in her life taught her what family is about."
I'm not going to lie, I picked today's book because it was relatively short. I'm leaving to go on a short vacation later this week and I had a lot of things that needed to get done before then. I will still be reading a book every day while on vacation, and the blog entries will go up as normal. Plus, I have some really fun vacation themed books picked out which I'm really looking forward to reading and blogging about.
But, vacationing with 19 food allergies, while also working on this blogging project, is kind of a daunting task. So it's going to take a few days to get ready - and over packing is going to be the name of the game. I'm a little bit nervous about being able to pull this off - but that's the whole point of this project, to see what it's like to read a book every single day no matter what else is going on in my life. So, to make a long story short (oops, it might actually be too late for that), I had a busy day. Plus I had to fit in watching The Bachelorette finale as well because nothing gets in the way of my trash TV. Of course now that I've watched it, I wish I had my two hours back - but that's beside the point now.
I have mixed feelings about today's book. I think it was a good book - not great, but good enough to spend one day on - but I didn't feel a very strong connection to any of the people in the book. I'm willing to acknowledge that the lack of connection could have been my fault. It was hard for me to focus on the book I was reading while also trying to figure out how to bring all of my weird allergy-free food with me on vacation. And, by the way dear readers, I want to apologize for using the word connection twice in one paragraph (oops, that last one makes three). Let that be a lesson to me, never write a blog entry five minutes after watching The Bachelorette. Next thing you know I'm going to be using phrases like "When we started this journey . . . "
I think another reason why I didn't connect to the people in this book is because the family in the book claims to be anti-gossip. How on earth am I supposed to relate to a family like that? I'm trying to wrap my mind around the possibility that there are truly people in the world who don't ever say bad things about anyone - but I'm having a hard believing that. Every person I've ever met who claims to not judge and gossip about others turns out to be just as judgemental as the rest of us - they're just judgemental in a different way. We judge people, and the alleged anti-judgement people judge (and lecture) us for judging others. This reminds me of that episode of S&TC where Carrie says "Are we too quick to judge judging?" I personally don't have the energy to put up the pretense of not judging others - instead I restrict my judgements to bad clothes and people I can't stand. If that makes me a bad person, then fine I'm a bad person, I can accept that.
And while we're on the subject of my bad qualities, there was a part of the book that reminded me of TV (what a shock.) The author mentions at one point that she felt like her life had turned into a Lifetime TV movie. Which made me think, I haven't looked at the Lifetime Movie Network schedule in a while. I better go check that out right now, I could be missing out on some really great movies. And that turned out to be a very fortunate thing, because it turns out that they're playing She Woke Up Pregnant next week, which is my second favorite Michele Greene TV movie (second to the one where she becomes a surrogate to a snotty, yuppie couple who has everything but love, who end up only wanting one of the twins she's pregnant with.) If you've never watched the movie, I urge you to watch it. It'll change your life. I've already accepted that if you do watch it any shred of respect you may have previously had for me will evaporate within the first five minutes of the movie. But I'm not going to let that stop me.
And now, because I'm still in a Bachelorette mood - Dear readers, will you accept this rose? I just feel like we've been on the most amazing journey these last few weeks, and I think we could be really great together . . . for the next six months, until reality sets in and we end up having to break up on Good Morning America and then start complaining about one another to Us Magazine.
