Reading, the true love of my life.

I have friends for the facets of my personality. I have a public blog, and a private semi-secret one. I still have things I only share with myself. My cats hear things no one else does. Blah blah. I've turned to reading lately to soothe the anxieties within, to find more like minds since they don't exist in the town I live in, to broaden my horizons mentally, and for many other reasons. Through doing so I've found many who feel like a friend of my mind, even if we've never exchanged any discourse at all.

My average goddess is a friend of my soul, of the searcher in me, and of the girl who likes to dress well, be in shape, eat right, and be hot all while being successful too. The Average Goddess. A brilliant, witty, fantastic human being I am so lucky to know. She inspires me, I want to be her. I adore her!! And I read her. :)

Sasha Sappho. I felt the oddest connection upon reading Sasha's words the first time. It's weird how close you can feel to someone's words. And I love to comment on her blogs because they always get me thinking, I hope she doesn't mind the cyber stalk, it's entirely friendly. :D

Essin' Em. I admire how she shares herself and her mind so freely and openly, and it's a lovely mind full of brilliant ideas and wonderful causes and live and let live ideas. I love reading her, she opens my mind up wider every time I do.

Other blogs I am really enjoying for their mind opening and other properties: AAG, Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl, and finally Bunny.

Some of these are sex blogs, because I like sex. Others are what I like to think of as blogs of the broken, one is both. My blog falls under the blogs of the broken category quite clearly as well.

Reading all of this is so nice for me, a simple way to put it, but that's how it makes me feel. Stimulated, interested, interesting to myself, sometimes it helps me feel less alone, less misunderstood, less confused, and just.... well, nice. However, I think it is severely inflating my imposter syndrome... or maybe something else is. I never feel smart anymore. I don't feel take charge anymore (even though everyone tells me I am a take charge person... and my actions even say I am!!). I never feel like what I write or say or do is the BEST or wittiest or most informed option and therefore it almost feels futile to share.... I need to go to the therapist tomorrow. Something is definitely wrong here. Almost as soon as I stepped back into my house, after the joy of seeing my kitties wore off... I felt the apathy, the lethargy, the desire to hide my sluggish nature creeping back in. Is it grad school? Is it something in the water? Is it this ridiculous town? Or is it something else entirely?

I can't stand that I can't figure ME out right now. That's the one person I have always been able to understand.....

Back to the reading: I also recently read a few books, I was trying to branch out from my normal escapism tendencies (meaning I only read high fantasy books). The books I chose this time on my latest buying spree were collections of stories, and a different type of fiction than I normally read. I still have some left but here are small reviews of the few I've read so far. (Aside: I NEED KINDLE! It would revolutionize my life and cut the $ I spend to read by a quarter!) I can't say I loved reading them as much as I usually do. I find blogs more satisfying than I did Chelsea's book. My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands by Chelsea Handler which was interesting because she's a woman who thinks a bit like a man, a comedian, a sassy brassy lady. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max (a self-professed narcissistic guy, this is a collection of stories from his younger years- he's also Bunny's ex) which was by turns funny, wheezing laugh inducing funny, appalling, too gross for me to read, and scary. However, I didn't find it laugh out loud funny, I didn't find her as.... confident as I thought she was, and rather than it being endearing I found it disappointing. She just may not be my kind of funny. Finally, I read Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner. I'm not sure how I feel about this book still, over a week after finishing it. I loved In Her Shoes which I read at my mom's house one vacation. So I thought I would really like this book, but I didn't find the main character entirely believable or identifiable. There were things in this book that started lots of thought processes for me, which I did enjoy. I just lost touch with the main character at some point in the book and I never got back to her. Strange. I can't explain it. I did love that the main character wasn't this super perfect gorgeous skinny thing. Alternately I was terrified that I had ever made a girl or woman a larger size than me feel the way she often felt in this book. I'm little.... most people are larger than I am.... :(. Again, that fear and paralysis right there over such a thought is fairly new. Maybe I have, but normally I would just be like: Oh well, in the future I will really try to be more cognizant and be sure I don't do that to anyone intentionally. Now? EEK!