Books.are.AlwaysFirst.

At this point, I have less than two weeks to go before I am State-side (or at least in the process). Most of us who have finished primary school may recall a feeling of delicious anticipation when the possibility of summer vacation came into view. Some people managed with the classic wall-calendar chart which allowed the prisoner a feeling of exacting a dent in time through a simple rip of the date from the wall. Others like myself, would cope by reminding ourselves and everyone around us of the specific number of days, hours, minutes, and secondsthat stood in the way of liberation and the traditional “end of school McDonalds backyard picnic.” To be fair, I do not think of my current situation as one analogous to prison. I might be inclined to think of house arrest might be more of an appropriate comparison had I not thought it disrespectful of the fantastic political dissident Ayn Sung Su Ki and her recent release from 7.5 years of house arrest in Burma. As it is, dear readers, you can appreciate the fact that I am very anxious to get home for the holidays. Devoid of a wall calendar that I can/would like to mutilate and respectful of the sanity of my lovely site mates, I have thrown myself into the completion of the following goal in order to pass the time more efficiently and (perhaps) more productively:

Those who know me at all are aware of the fact that I am something of a workaholic. I spent a significant number of Friday and Saturday nights in the Rolvaag Memorial Library studying such riveting subjects as the theological and political significance of the Second Vatican Council and (on bleaker days) the correct application of standard deviation principles to get through my one required math course. For as long as I can remember, various people in my life have informed me that I need to “lighten up, have some fun. You work too hard.” This observation seems to have followed me into the Peace Corps and for the first time, I am beginning to feel the specter of burn-out approaching.

Knowing that I have a full year of service left after I return to Azerbaijan, I feel that it is important to devise a plan in order to keep up enthusiasm and work ethic. To this end, I have decided to make something of a commitment to myself: I will read 75 books before I COS (“Close of Service”), or one year—whichever comes first. The purpose of this promise is to require myself to take time to engage in an activity which I enjoy more than any other and one whose product registers only in my own consciousness. Growing up as an only child, my sainted mother responded to my endless complaints of “being bored” by making me “to do lists” that included tasks such as, “read a book” and “play with stuffed animals.”

As a result, I have always enjoyed making lists and perhaps on some level, this course of action will assuage feelings of homesickness that seem to reveal themselves most frequently in the winter months. There is a substantive list of books that I have always wanted to read but surprisingly never found the time to tackle. I may embark on my fourth try to finish Anna Karenina. If I feel self-indulgent and in need of intellectual/ideological self actualization, I may order Jesus the Liberator or some anthology of Charles Dickens’ correspondence from halfpricebooks.com (I wonder if they know where Azerbaijan is). If not and my academic / personal Catholic guilt kicks in, I may go in search of what my ninth grade mind missed when I first attempted to read To Kill A Mockingbird. Perhaps a second shot at American poetry is in order. I have found that many of the books that I have read thus far appear at times in my service when I need their particular voice on some level. This venture, I believe, will be an interesting experiment.

But for now, I will finish my coffee and New Yorker comic section.