Many people that know me, and know that I’m a nerd, would be very surprised to hear that when The Fellowship of the Ring arrived in theaters in 2001, I had barely even heard of The Lord of the Rings. It was not until after I went to see the movie that I picked up the book that my mother had lying around the house. From the very first chapter, all those hobbits and elves and characters that you only talk about when making fun of your reclusive cousin, really sucked me in. LoTR became my favorite book and set off chain of total dweebism rivaled only by Samwise Gamgee himself. You see, the year 2001 also coincided with my graduating college and having not yet found a job. I was faced with oodles of free time and a new goal to read all the books that I should have been forced to read back in high school. To tell you the truth I’m not sure why I didn’t read them in high school. I was in marching band for Christ’s sake. Dweebism was rampant.
Anyway, when I finished Lord of the Rings I moved on to Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Once I had my fill of demented, deformed, and ostracized freaks, I moved on to Jane Austen to get my fill of dainty 1800’s girls who didn’t have jobs and waited around sewing doilies until a husband turned up. Didn’t take long to get sick of those. When I finally did find a job I began spending nearly every lunch hour reading. For the next 3 or 4 years I plowed thru book after book, covering everything from Animal Farm to Gone with the Wind to Huck Finn. I looked pretty damn intellectual sitting in Wendy’s with my copy of The Silmarillion. Yeah, I’m the one person who bought that book. It's like the bible of Middle Earth if you must know.
After about 4 years of this I began to slow it down. The old time language started to wear on my brain. I tried reading a Charlotte Bronte book a few months ago and couldn’t even finish it. I think my body is rejecting anything written prior to 1996. But I’m proud of what I accomplished. I didn’t waste a single minute of personal time that I was given at work. And that is kind of the point of this article. Use your lunch hour to do something for YOU. Read a book, work on your blog, go outside and take pictures, whatever. If you don’t absolutely need to work through your lunch hour, then don’t.
I did good, and you can too.
