Reading.

Oddly enough, for as much I've read in the past, it's not something I do much at all anymore...

I spent the better part of my high school career doing extracurricular reading in class.  Class would be going on around me, I'd be sitting with a book hidden below my desktop.  Various teachers dealt with this in different ways.  Mr. Boyd, my 8th grade Algebra teacher (and one of my least favorite examples of the profession) dragged my desk (with me sitting in it) to the back of the room.  Told me that if I didn't want to participate in his class, I could sit by myself (ostracism is an interesting tactic).  I got a hell of a lot of reading done in his class.  I suppose I could thank him for that.

Mr. Gelman, who taught Psychology, once stopped the class about forty-five minutes in, and castigated me for not taking notes and reading instead.  He claimed that I was disrespecting him by giving him my undivided attention and having the courtesy to take notes.  I recapped his 45 minutes in three and pointed out that I had yet to get less than a 95% on any test that he had given.  He thought about it and let it go at that.

Ms. Zeigler, my Geometry teacher, used to ask me one question every class period, to make sure I had an inkling of what was being covered.  Every third or fourth day, she'd take a few minutes to come over and sit by me whilst everyone else was finishing whatever assignment they had.  She'd stop by, ask me what I was reading at the moment, talk it over with me briefly.  Towards the end of each marking period, she'd stop by with the sheet showing how she determined her grades (weightings of assignments, tests, notebook (the class notebook, handed in at the end of each marking period, may strike me as one of the most pointless ideas ever)) and a small sheet telling me how many of the homework assignments I hadn't done that I would need to complete in order to get various grades.  I loved Ms. Zeigler.

I spent the first couple of years out of high school hanging around a friend's dorm room reading his books.  (People are right, you can learn a lot at a college.)  Without having graduated from High School or having gone to college, I can still get about an 86% score on a literature specific GRE.  I'm guessing that this says less about me than it does about where the bar stands on the GRE.  I'm actually more proud of the time I gave all five questions to the Jeopardy round "South American Authors" without seeing the clues.

I had a good couple of years after my father died where I'd read a book or two a day.  I actively tried to read outside of whatever comfort-zone I thought I might have.  Forced myself to read things I would never have considered picking up in a million years.  Mitch Albom (a bit trite, but not so bad nonetheless), Paulo Coelho (Very trite, and now I know why I didn't want to read it), Ann Coulter, BDSM manuals, trash romance novels,self-help, math textbooks.  Anything.

I'd walk into a bookstore and pick a random person in the store and tell them to push a book on me.  Any book.

Not so much, anymore. 

And I'm really not so sure why that is.  I guess I've already heard too many words that haven't meant much of anything at all.  The older I get, the less convinced I am that many of them do mean much of anything.  I don't know.  I used to think that amongst those pages, I'd find some answers.  And in a lot of ways, I think I did.  The thing is, they're as contradictory and meandering and meaningful or meaningless as life itself.

One thing I have learned, though, it doesn't matter how "correct" a particular piece of knowledge or information is, if you are not around people who want to hear it in the first place.