Musing Monday...What Would Betty White Say?

Wow, is it just me, or are these weeks just zipping by, faster and faster? It seems no sooner do I answer one MM post and find a charming picture of the world's cutest doggie for Bandit Tuesday, that Monday is here again. So lets check out this Monday's question, as always from the the cyber desk of Just One More Page.

Do you have to carve out time in your day for reading (due to work and other obligations), or does your reading just happen naturally?

I find that the time that I have available to read  is often based on the book I am reading at the moment.
If I love a book, if it is one of those rare and wonderful books that grabs you to such a degree that you hate to leave the delightful world it creates to return to the 'real' world and the sometime dull obligations of real life...I find a great deal of time. If it is a book that is just ok or one that I am not loving but feel an obligation to read...oddly enough I often do not find enough free time to get much read.

Yes, a great book can have an actually effect on the Nature of Time, creating more hours in the day and mondo amounts of uncommitted time. It is a fact!

Well, not really. The day is still 24 hours. I still need to go to work. I need to make something for dinner.
But adjustments can be made. That laundry will wait until I find out what happens to our hero. So what if the grass gets a little taller out in the front yard? I need to ferret out who the murderer is. Do I really need to go to the supermarket...or discover if 'happily ever after' is possible and justice will prevail. Really, which is more important? I am sure I can chip something out of the freezer that is still edible. Freeze burn, sneezer burn!

Now, a few qualifications. I do not have a spouse or little children pulling at my apron strings, crying in hunger. I don't even have a pet, although we all know that in his heart, Bandit is really mine. No one will chastise me if I never got to the post office to mail that package or forgot to call the plumber...except that little voice in my head. But that voice can be easily silenced by a really good book.
I also have a job that enables me to read from time to time. When I work weekends, especially when I work through the long, dark nights, there is some free time to read a page or two...or a hundred.

So, you may wonder, as I do, why I don't get more read than I actually do. I should be reading a half dozen books a week, instead of my average one or two.
Distractions! Evil, time wasting distractions.
And I am easily distracted.
The Evil Boob Tube, otherwise known as TV.
The lure of The World Wide Web, the internet.

This is where Betty White comes in. Did you see her on Saturday Night Live this week? No, I didn't, but I saw the clip from her opening monologue this past week, where she thanks her Facebook fans for getting her on the show and then admits she did not know what Facebook was before this happen. So, she checked it out and then said it seemed like a tremendous waste of time. While I am not a big fan of these social networks...maybe because I am not a very social person...I do find it very easy to waste time online or staring at a flickering screen. "I will just watch one more episode of the "Deadliest Catch" marathon..I must know who catches the most crab this season!" or "Let me just read a few more things on my Google Reader...I have a few hundred unread." Before you know it, the day is gone, and very little reading done.

But then, that book was not that great.
When it is, when the book is wonderful and captures my imagination, my unread Google Reader reaches into the stratosphere, Tivoed shows go unwatched and the grass gets as high as an elephants eye.
But a great book is worth it.

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