On Time and breaking bad

 

Time feels so elastic to me. Years speed by and moments are interminable. Last week seems like a year ago and last year seems like a week ago. Sometimes, when I'm in the shower, or eating lunch and reading, I feel like I have never not been here, doing this. I think it has something to do with the reading. I get lost so easily in the time scale of the book. Days, months, years, passing at roughly 100 pages an hour. Looking up after reading feels like surfacing after being underwater - coming up for air, the sudden displacement, brought back into the present.

This year is the first year that I've felt ready for fall, for the holidays. Usually I'm completely unprepared mentally for any season - as soon as I get used to summer, it's already fall, and so on. Finally, I actually feel in sync with time.

Lately, it's been epics on my reading list. Homegoing, and currently Barkskins - both tracing generations of families over centuries. Actually, it's harder to get lost in these since they read more like short stories rather than a novel - it's hard to get really involved with a character when they're only around for a few chapters.

I've been reading a lot of reader reviews lately where people complain about not being able to relate to a character. This seems the strangest to me - why read about yourself? The whole point of reading is partly escapism to me - experiencing other lives, other times. Sometime I think if I had all the money in the world I would just read and travel - which perhaps is a way of saying I would rather live other lives than my own. Or it is (is it?) experiencing the world more fully, having all the experiences. There are only a very few characters I truly haven't been able to stand - Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (all she was interested in was social climbing), and Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights (all they were interested in were themselves). I think it's the mix of greed and obsession and the absence of anything else.

We're watching Breaking Bad right now - the whole thing from the beginning - missed it when it was on the first time, I think because of Mad Men? - and I'm having a similar problem with Walter White. Greed and obsession also, to the detriment and actual causing of pain and death to everyone around him. I love Mike and Saul and Jesse - Mike's my favorite. (Because I sometimes feel like a curmudgeonly old man?) He's just so capable and so tired all the time!

 

 

Closing with a photo from the American Southwest in honor of Breaking Bad - the skies really are amazing there. This trip from May was what my next blog post was supposed to be about - to be continued...

Closing with a photo from the American Southwest in honor of Breaking Bad - the skies really are amazing there. This trip from May was what my next blog post was supposed to be about - to be continued...