Tin Tin and the Case of Chief Collig's Missing...

The history of my reading textbooks in college has not been a happy or bright one. Nay…the history of me reading any books, anywhere, has not been a happy or bright one. As a young boy, my attention span lasted as long as the life of a deviled egg at a church potluck. Growing up I didn’t read many books, and the ones I did “read,” were 90% pictures. My thoughts on reading at that time were, “Why constrain a severely hyperactive child in one place, doing the same thing for far too long?” I could be outside in the warm sun, pretending I’m Frank or Joe solving the case of Chief Collig’s missing hemorrhoid cream. I must be completely honest with you…I have never in my life read a Hardy Boys book. The Adventures of Tin Tin was more my caliber, although I always enjoyed the Hardy Boys book covers. They always looked like they would be fun to read, and stupidly, that was enough for me. That right there goes to prove that my childhood was a wasteland of “wow–I–should–haves.” I did eventually learn to read, and actually enjoyed it. But the textbooks…oh…the textbooks.

Somewhere deep inside me I do long to read and comprehend, but unfortunately the rest of my being protests to the studious side of me. I sit down, read a paragraph or two, then BAM, I’m Spider-man swinging valiantly through the Big Apple, racing to save Mary Jane from the clutches of the sinister and iniquitous Green Goblin (Amazing Spider-man #137, for all those anal enough to check), then I’m back to my reading. Not two minutes later, I’m Aragorn, unsheathing my broadsword in front of a thousand hellish, bloodthirsty Orcs, and out of nowhere comes an awe-inspiring symphony with music so powerful it moves me to feel like I could cut through that wall of Orcs like a hot knife through low fat butter…then I’m back to reading again. This can carry on for several hours, and is quite an enjoyable activity.

If not daydreaming, reading in bed is the second stupidest idea one could ever have when competing with a due date. The idea acts like a Trojan horse—it seems like such a great concept when it first comes to you, like drinking two liters of milk before a trampoline party, but the consequences, as all will soon find out, are devastating—you wake up a month later, it’s graduation, and you’re still on page five… not to mention that page five is permanently stuck to your face due to the severe drooling problem you have.

I am happy to announce that textbook and I broke up back in April. Yeah… I had enough of the guilt trips, the speeches, the money I spent on her, and how she always brought up stuff from the last chapter in our arguments…not cool! She always had that look on her face like, “Why don’t you hold me anymore? You never highlight! You just read between the lines.” And I’m like, “Well every time we start having a good time, you bring up the pros and cons of predestination. Needless to say, it didn’t end well; I knew it was a dead-end relationship as soon as I read the prologue. Well I must go, I see a cute non-fiction walking my way—wish me luck!

Sincerely – Brad