Monday, Aug. 30, 2010 9:29 p.m.

so many books

My dog was spayed today. She's just laying in my lap now. She's wearing a cone so that she doesn't pick at her stitches. She seems sad. Poor dog; she has no idea what happened to her today or why.

We walked to CPK tonight for dinner. Stopped by Barnes and Nobel for coffee. And walked around a little inside. So much knowledge. So many books; many repeating the exact same thing as another, but for using different words.

In my earlier 20s, when I went into a bookstore, I felt anxious in the presence of the vast knowledge it contained. So much information that I would never have time to learn. Now, as I'm nearing the end of my 20s, I walk around a bookstore and think of the redundancy of it all. Can't it all be simpler? Cant we have just a couple books on each topic? Do we really need so many...when so many of them are basically the same thing, but with different covers?

Shelves and shelves of cookbooks. Pictures of popular cooks on the cover, or specialized in particular kinds of cake. Hip looking cookbooks for college students, dinner-for-two cookbooks for newlyweds, pregnancy cookbooks for expectant mothers, cookbooks for children that are picky eaters. How many cookbooks must one own? Are all those needed? What happened to the quintessential Betty Crocker cookbooks of yesteryear?

I walked by the wedding section. Books and books and books and books of guides. Guides for the groom, guides for the mother-of-the-bride, guides for destination weddings, guides for budget weddings, guides for everything. When planning my wedding, I had ONE Weddings for Dummies book. It's the same copy that my cousin and a friend used to plan theirs. And to be honest, I only read parts of it. Do girls really need all those books to plan a wedding? A wedding is a wedding. It's one day, then it's over. All those books make it seem way more complicated than it is.

I walked by the pregnancy/childbirth area. 2 whole bookcases. I failed to understand why so many books are needed. Doesn't "What to Expect When You're Expecting" cover the majority of what you need to know? Does there really need to be a book all about your belly and journaling its changes? It gets bigger cause there's a kid in there growing. I'm an oldest child, but I've always felt bad about how much emphasis there is on a first pregnancy...I always wonder if a second and third child feel cheated since their mother likely doesn't journal about those pregnancies anymore once they've become old hat.

Maybe I just saw my mom pregnant so much that it's not a big deal to me. Pregnancy is natural. It happens to your body. It knows what to do, whether or not you do. You just go along for the ride.

Or maybe I just have accepted that my body will never know the changes of pregnancy, so that section of the bookstore just seems like an empty hole to me. I have no feeling toward it, because I can't have a feeling toward it.

(I'd like to see some books about journaling your infertility struggle...oh wait, that's no fun and no one wants to think about it.)

I then thought about my evening last night. I want to brag about it. I want to remember that it was real. I want to tell others, to try to explain to them the awesome strangeness of it all. It was cool. Very cool. Something I never really thought I'd get to do. But I don't know how to talk about it. I'm afraid of sounding like I'm bragging. Or that I'm trying to show off how awesome of a life I have.

I don't have an awesome life. Not really. I make it sound good on paper, yes, but that's just to make up for other things.

I'm alone. But I've gotten used to it. I'm alone, but hardly ever lonely anymore. People don't know/understand me; I don't know/understand them. I've got my dog (although she's pretty sad looking right now). I've got my husband. I've got my two jobs. I've got my garden. I've got the internet. I keep myself busy and I get to do occasional cool things like go to Las Vegas and Emmy after-parties and Civil War reenactments.

I'm content being an island.

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