The Summer as an Ellipse

Spencer thinks I'm crazy because I feel guilty when I take time to exercise.  But I worked eight hours today, came home, tidied up, retrieved the mail, and then changed into my exercise clothes and took an hour to exercise and shower.  Ten minutes after I finished, my parents got home.  I said, "I was exercising," to explain my unseemly damp hair. 

Mom looks me up and down, and asks, "And where did you find time to do that?  You couldn't have made dinner instead?"

I should clarify that 'dinner' tonight was leftovers, revived with a bit of fresh salad.  It takes all of five minutes to prepare a salad, which I did next, and washed the dishes, desperately wanting to ask my mom why I felt guilty for doing something that all other people in the world would call healthy.  But I didn't, because she was tired from work and taking care of Aunty Teddy, and if I got 'uppity,' she'd be entitled to start to dress me down.

Other things that both require me to discipline myself and, contradictively, induce guilt:

• Writing, which benefits no one but me.
• Studying my brains out at college, which benefits no one but me.
• Defying the conservative ideology of my parents and trying to sanely discuss policy decisions with them, which inevitably devolves into my dad denouncing the evils of the Welfare State, which apparently is the ultimate destination of all liberal lines of thought.

I was homesick, why?

ETA: You know, I'm going to exercise every day this summer, and I am going to do this by working 7.5 hour days, going to work early, and not telling my parents.  I can't argue with them, but it doesn't mean that they are right.

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I also want to mention how much I'm reading.  I'm reading a lot.  Not counting my re-reads of the last three Harry Potter books, I've read four books by Charlaine Harris, two books by Jasper Fforde, two books by Anne Perry, two random pieces of brainy chick-lit, one of the Temeraire books, and Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay.  Most of these have been in the last week.  I have nine more books sitting on my dresser before I head back to the library for a refill.

It's very refreshing to be someone else.  I have never understood people who have never read for pleasure--and there are an unbalancing lot of them.  I read books like people of the Future play VR games.  I come out the other side of a four-hour novel exhausted and triumphant from the perils of the heroine, and if I'm lucky, it'll be a serial novel, and I can jump back into a new and familiar story.  I have used a bookmark only a handful of times in my life--if I'm taking a break from a book at all, then I will flip through the pages in the middle until I recognize the shape of the words on the page.  And Real Literature is--not wasted on me, entirely, but I enjoy it in the same way that I enjoy thorny calculus.  I'm happy about it only awhile after the fact, when I've sloughed off the cloying sense of realism and dismay.

There's a duality about reading too.  Reading is a profoundly private activity, where your eyes act as the go-between for your brain and a page, but it's a page and a story that thousands of other brains have experienced.  And a book is extemporal, in a way that movies are not.  You give up time for a movie, and sit there, and it moves through you on its own time.  A book is always there, and the story is even more always there, and so when you are reading the story that thousands of others have also read, you pretty much may as well be reading it at the same time.  It is private, but not lonely.  And for your symptomatic introvert, that's a sizeless blessing.

I am explaining these things out only because I feel so darn happy about them.  Exultant.  It doesn't matter how dismal or isolated the reality of my summer might become, because there are books.