I didn't know you had to flip the page to read more.

My internet connection is either hibernating for the cold months, or it is on its feeble last breaths. Yesterday I waited thirty minutes for amazon to load. Read here for more babble on the computer I should give a toddler to play with.

In the absence of blogs, articles, and emails, I have returned to these funny things called books. I thought kindle was just another word for book. I then realized that reading a book meant holding a device that had enough flaps to fly away on its own. 

I've actually spent my entire childhood and adolescence with my nose buried in a book. I imagine that future generations, possibly offspring of my own, will regard books as flightless rectangular things. 

In kindergarten I struggled with reading as every child was, but by first grade I was reading chapter books. One time my first grade teacher asked me what I was reading. I promptly said, "The Junie B. Jone's series. I'm about half-way through."

The teacher said, "Oh dear, I'm sure your mother reads those to you."

I replied, "No. I read them myself."

The teacher firmly placed her hands on her hips, which were about at my eye level, and sternly said, "Carmella, it's wrong to lie. You're not good enough to read those." 

I sometimes have lofty imaginations that I am an undiscovered prodigy. Einstein's teacher thought he was mentally retarded. I had a speech impediment that rendered me almost unintelligible for most of my childhood.  I tell myself, there was a genius at work at even that young of age. 

Like every child of the past twenty years, I grew up on Harry Potter. I actually thought I was a witch, and I would perform spells that would infallibly prove I was. For instance, I would point at the cat with my index finger (this was my substitution for a wand) and would demand for the cat to walk in some form of complex gibberish like, "wakkmeharra". And guess what? The cat walked. Like magic, one would say. 

Yet I have advanced to a new addiction (an addiction for bookworms I mean),  Steig Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (first in the trilogy). Normally I'm not for the murder mystery because scooby-doo only keeps someone interested if they are under the age of eight, or incredibly stoned. Also, John Grisham sucks. I can't put his writing skills in fancier jargon. His book's just really suck. 

For one of the first times my feelings about a bestseller matches the shortened blurbs on the back cover. It is "engrossing"..."blazing"..."beautifully paced"..and so on. This book has taken my attention from calculus! Actually anything can distract me from calculus. For instance, a pretty cloud outside the window. So, as my teacher plotted away at some graph, I was in Sweden solving a murder. If my friend leaned over to ask for the time I resolutely lifted my hand and said, "Sorry, but I am investigating a murder right now."

A few times during the school day I slammed my hand down on the table and gasped in shock. The classroom paused and someone asked if I had finally killed the fucking fly that had been buzzing around for past hour. All I could sputter were things like, "He found the photographs!", "She's being shot at!", "I think I know!" 

Less than an hour ago I went to the bathroom, with my book in hand. I peed for probably twenty seconds, but sat on the toilet for fifteen more minutes, paralyzed with the need to finish the chapter. Later, I got up to have a snack. I sat motionless over the counter reading the book, until I abruptly realized I was in the kitchen to find food. 

This is the Harry Potter for adults. It's just as addictive, but includes all the sexual torture, murder, and danger every adult loves! 

I actually just got distracted by reading again. 

And now I'm only thinking about finishing the paragraph I was at.

Gotta go. 

(sorry for no pictures. I began searching for images, but, yet again, my internet is giving out on me.)