Sleep and Reading

I haven’t written lately because we’ve been getting to bed so late. My fault. Poor Mary (I’m always saying that!), she’ll want to go to bed and I’ll beg and manipulate her till she agrees to stay up (usually “till the next commercial”). I try to get her to change into her PJ’s in the living room, but that doesn’t usually work. She says it only takes five minutes. Yeah, but that’s five minutes of, say, Sex in the City that I’m missing! And yet, you know what? I detest that feeling of addiction that sacrifices everything so that I won’t miss those five minutes. That’s one of the reasons I hate watching TV—it’s so addicting. (Why isn’t it “addictive”? Or is it?) Plus, watching it alone makes me really lonely. (Hm. I wonder if my frequent use of italics and bold means that I’m a bad writer? It’s just that I hear it in my head a certain way and that the way I want the reader to hear it in his/her head. Some people would probably say that I have to formulate my sentence in just such a way that the reader will hear it that way. Or else they’d say that it’s the reader’s prerogative to hear it the way he/she chooses. I guess that’s also what makes actors’ jobs so interesting—that there are so many different ways to read the same sentence. At least, in English, since German, for example, is so much more monotone. I wonder if the color of the font, much less the style, influences what you write. Hm. Just think how that could affect research papers or writers. Wow—that would be a great question to ask writers. You know what, I’m sure it does influence you. I’m writing this with a beautifully curlicued handwriting in red and I just keep hearing this British voice in my head.)

Ok, back to Mary. Yeah, so then she usually ends up sleeping late the next morning or else she gets up early and then is sleepy all day. That’s really awful of me. But, then, I’m not holding a gun to her head. And sometimes I’m ready to go to bed and she’s not. When I first moved in with her, she always went to bed between nine and nine-thirty. Well, it’s been especially bad that we’ve been getting to bed late because I’ve started reading the third Harry Potter book to her, and if she gets in bed too late, then she doesn’t want me to read to her, or even if I do get to read, she falls asleep on my. I absolutely love reading out loud, so this is one of my favorite times of the day. I’ve gotten into the pattern of reading out of the New Testament after dinner (sometimes after breakfast) and then HP at bedtime. We’ve just gotten through a rather rocky time in the NT—Paul’s letter to the Romans. Long and Boring. And full of lot s of, in my personal opinion, hogwash. All that business about God not being unjust if he decides not to be merciful because if he didn’t have the choice of whether or not to be merciful, his mercy wouldn’t be worth anything. And that business about how the Jews are still Number One, even if they don’t believe. That if a Jew decides to believe, he’s worth more than a Gentile who believes, because the Jews are the Chosen People. Give me a break. If that’s all really God, then he can have it. And I still don’t understand why God had to send Jesus. I mean, wasn’t it like he was admitting that he’d made a mistake? Even the Adam and Eve story makes it sound like God made a mistake. I mean, a perfect creator who makes such a fallible creation… There’s something fishy there. (I’ll have to watch “Oh, God” again—except it’s just too painful to see anything with John Denver in it. His death really broke my heart.) Ok, I understand that Paul was speaking to people of a completely different mindset, who really needed to be convinced that they could share a religious belief, much less a religion. Well, he did finally get some really good stuff in there at the end. That was something worth reading over and over again, but, honestly, I don’t know how so much of the NT has survived this long. Talk about bad writing. And I have to admit that if it were just up to the NT (thus far) to convert me and make a believer out of me…I’m afraid it wouldn’t have done the trick.

Ahem, back to Mary. I’m starting to forget what I’ve told you and what I haven’t. How do writers do it? Geez. Or, gee whiz, as Mary sometimes say—cracks me up. Yes, I think I am absolutely in love with Mary. And the more time I spend with her, the crazier about her I get. I love the way she sticks out her bottom lip when she’s getting ready to take a drink. Or the face she makes when she’s lying in bed and I’m rubbing cream onto her face. Or how she says, “Oh, honey, that feels good,” when I’ve gotten the water temperature for a bad just right or when she puts her feet into bed and feel her bean bag. I love the way she subtly flicks the covers back a bit to see if there’s a beanbag there. I even love the way she says, “Honey, can you take me to the potty?” in the middle of the night. What is it about her? I know her sisters all wonder. But it’s not just me who has fallen under her spell. All the ladies who came here, her doctors, visiting nurses, salespeople, people at the grocery store… they all fall under her spell. And, come on, she’s been married three times… she obviously had a way with men. (Anna and Angie, she says, always said she was boy crazy, although she doesn’t know where they got that from.) Well, as Mom says, it’s a good thing I am so crazy about Mary.

Ok, enough about Mary! I have to get to sleep.