Welcome to adulthood...

A few weeks ago I casually mentioned to my doc that I don’t sleep well sometimes. I either can’t fall asleep or don’t stay asleep, and I inquired about taking something light to help. I fully expected him to go off on a bunch of medical reasons why this is happening and to refuse to give me something, being the overly-cautious doc he has been since I was seven. Much to my surprise, that didn’t happen. His first response was, “Welcome to adulthood. Adults don’t sleep.”

He suggested reading and asked if I have a Kindle. I was too surprised that he knew what that was to answer anything more than a simple no. After much dialogue back-and-forth about reading and the Kindle, he suggested I get one to make reading easier for me (physically).

You would think that since I earned a Minor in English, I might be an avid reader. Wrong. That couldn’t be any further from the truth. My college required students to get a Major with a Minor or to double-Major. It’s probably their way of getting thousands more dollars out of you, but they’d probably say it’s to make you a more diverse and well-rounded individual. An English Minor was only four more classes and since I’m excellent at writing papers, I figured that was the way to go. Yes. I took the easy way out. My English GPA ended up as a perfect 4.0 (all done as Independent Study, too) and it boosted my overall GPA. It was a win-win for me.

But all of that reading burned me out. The semester averaged a book every week or week-and-a-half. One semester had me reading 10 Shakespeare plays in 12-weeks. You do that and see how much you love reading afterwards. You won’t love it so much.

Reading also hurt my eyes and made my arms exhausted. It was physically strenuous to hold a book open and turn the page without the whole thing falling over. And since I couldn’t hold a book up or tip my head down to see the pages, I had to “bend” my eyes down and strain them to focus, leaving me with a headache. I did eventually get my school books digitized, but it still strained my eyes to read on the computer for hours. So, I’ve hated reading ever since. Even for fun. I think I’ve read three books for fun since high school, if not longer.

I recently decided I wanted to read The Cure, a true-life story about two children with muscular dystrophy and their father who went on a mission to find a cure. The upcoming movie Extraordinary Measures stems from this book. I’ll write more on this in another post. So I went to see if Amazon had it as an e-book. Of course, the only option was the Kindle format. I was disappointed. But then I saw a glimmer of hope. I saw something that said Kindle for PC. Curious about what that was, I clicked on it. I discovered you can get the Kindle software for your PC and the best part? It’s free. You only pay for each book you download. A MAC version is coming soon. Needless to say, I immediately downloaded the software and then paid for a download of The Cure.

That was less than a week ago and I’ve already finished the book. I think I might start to like this reading thing and it has helped me wind-down at night. Maybe the doc was right. I just limited my time to keep my eyes from getting crabby. And, so I can read in bed, I have installed Kindle for PC on my Dell Mini and can now have all books on both computers.

Next up, The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks.

Thank you Amazon for making the software available and for free. :)

TTFN!