A short attention span and a toddler
One of my favorite bloggers, the magnificent 500Jerk, asks:
What’s on your bedeside table? What does your bedside table say about you?
I’m at work right now, but I can tell you what you’d find on my bedside table, aside from the three-day-old cup of water and a dusty lamp (which obviously says that we don’t dust as often as we should). At any given time, my bedside table is covered in children’s books for bedtime reading to the household toddler. I think one of them right now is the wonderful Llama Llama Red Pajama, still dealing with his llama drama.
Also on my bedside table are several unfinished books I started months ago: The Things They Carried – which I was rereading and therefore have an excuse not to finish – and the last book in McCarthy’s Border trilogy. I love McCarthy, but I have not enjoyed the border trilogy. I’m hopelessly mired in the last book because I can’t deal with the main character falling in love with a dying underage prostitute.
Maybe my bedside table says I’ve been bad at picking books lately, but what it says to me is a warning about my short attention span. I’ve considered getting the Kindle reader for my iTouch; I don’t read books because I can flip open the ‘Touch and have some immediate gratification in the form of brain candy. And I’m not proud of that fact.
So, what is on your bedside table, and what does it say about you?
Thanks so much for the compliment! I inspected my bedside table some more last night and also turned up the original Moosewood Cookbook (classic vegetarian–bought and inscribed in 1991, heavily used). Also, a book on home-schooling (dusty, phew) and Tell Me The Truth About Love, a W.H. Auden poetry collection that includes the great line: “He was my North, my South, my East, my West. My working week and my Sunday rest.”
Love it. That’s the 500Jerk Spouse for me.
Speaking of the Spouse, I also inspected his side of the bed, a veritable rat’s nest. Among the clutter: (1) coins; (2) receipts; (3) shredded scraps and bits of paper; (4) How To Live on a Few Acres (homesteading gudie); (5) a stray Mother Earth News or two; (6) Suttree; (7) matches (LOTS of matches). Also, now, the Couple Survival Manual I mentioned yesterday–at least someone’s reading it.
I used to have a copy of the Moosewood Cookbook; it has a great recipe for guacamole.
Katie doesn’t have a bedside table, so when I was making a list of what’s on my bedside table, I was ignoring her stuff. It sounds like her bedside table would have very similar to the 500Jerk Spouse’s, sans matches. And our copy of Suttree is always on loan; it’s at a neighbor’s house right now.