How has your week been? I’ll tell you that for me, the week has pretty much sailed by in a haze of drugs. Which is nice. What a lovely member of society I turned out to be.

Nah, it’s just cold medicine I speak of. That, and some of the ol’ Immodium. Now I have said too much. But it was a truth that did need to be shared for the sake of full disclosure. As much as I aspire to be a true drug addict, I just don’t have the follow-through to make something like that happen. Besides, becoming an addict would mean I’d have to find a dealer to sell me the junk, and well...that sounds a lot like “legwork” to me just to locate such an individual, and then there’s the follow-up purchasing I’d have to do…yeah, it’s way too much of a commitment. I think I’ll stick to over the counter stuff. Like beer.

So many people around me are sick, too. At work, we haven’t had a full department all week long. Someone’s always out sick. Either “there’s something going around,” like everyone says, or we’re all a bunch of underachieving lazy people who just don’t feel like putting in a full days’ work. Flip a coin.

When I haven’t been sick, I have been doing things like going out to eat with my sister the other day to the big-ass salad buffet place. That’s the actual name. It was delicious and quite filling. Buffets are evil, and encourage outrageous gluttony. I am pretty sure buffets would have been mentioned in the Bible as something a good, God-fearing person would never go to, had the word “buffet” been invented back in the Bible-writing era; you know, that time period where everyone and their brother’s brother were writing their own “books” and submitting them to the Bible Compilation Company.

Everyone knows the famous books, like the book of Genesis, the book of Revelation, and the Book of Love. But, most of the books of the Bible didn’t go on to become best-sellers. For example, for the life of me, I can’t remember a THING that happens in Samuel I. Or the 2nd Corinthians. All I remember from Bible study and Sunday School is that God speaketh (a LOT) and God rained down anger on non-believers and calves were sacrificed and people turned into pillars of salt. Which is pretty awesome, but it never says if deer came out and licked the pillar of salt.

Even as a kid, I was well aware of how much deer love salt licks. And guinea pigs. Our guinea pig, Gizmo, had a lovely wheel of salt he’d lick like the dickens. So anyway, what I am trying to say was that I was sitting there in Sunday School, imagining Lot’s wife getting turned into a huge pile of salt, which attracted all the woodland deer and guinea pigs who stood around licking Lot’s wife down to a pillar of nothing. And I would giggle to myself, because deer and guinea pigs are very cute. (Especially when they are wearing little “biblical-times head scarves and robes”, which they were in my imagination.)

Speaking of books, I think I am going to get a library card soon. I need to stop buying books I want to read, and get into the habit of borrowing them. Now that I am months into a heavy reading kick, I’ve got to keep it going. I plan to read “Watership Down” next because I never actually read it as a kid.

My sister and I were talking about the horrible, depressing books the school system forced us to read in school. Now there are so many great books out there for young people to read, and the whole Harry Potter thing proved that reading didn’t have to suck to a whole new generation of kids. But in my opinion, the schools continue to muck it up by assigning books that are complete downers.

If a book depresses you, or makes you cry, and then your teacher assigns you another downer right after that, and so on and so on, I think your opinion on reading is going to be affected. Here’s my list of books that are commonly read in schools (at least they were when I was in school) that are just boring, depressing or just plain unreadable:

• Old Yeller (a whole book about a dog dying? I never read it, and I never will!)

• A Separate Peace (all I remember about this is a kid named Phineas falls out of a tree, breaks his leg and dies from the infection. So good it will make you jam a pencil into your eye so you can stop reading it.)

• The Grapes of Wrath (a whole book about a poverty stricken family dealing with something depressing-sounding called “The Dust Bowl.” They starve, they cry, they are dirty with dust. Oh, Jesus.)

• The Great Gatsby (Gatsby winds up dead in his pool, and another character is hit by a car and there’s a description of how the accident tore her breast off. Wow, if that won’t get you excited for reading I don’t know what will.)

• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (old man makes stuff up to cope with his terribly dull existence… it’s very sad and paints a bleak picture of life.)

• Flowers for Algernon (this is the one about the mentally challenged guy who has surgery to become smart, gets smart, starts to really enjoy life and right when it is getting really good, BAM! The surgery reverses itself and he goes stupid again. Probably THE most depressing thing I have ever read, and that’s saying a lot.)

• The Scarlet Letter (people being unfaithful, people treating other people like crap, people blaming and people getting swept up in lies…sounds great. Oh, and the best part is it takes place in a boring old village with boring clothes and boring social customs)

• Antigone (Woman goes against government to prove the law of the gods is more important than man’s laws, and she dies. In fact, a lot of people die. And their bodies are left in the dirt. I had to read this a grand total of THREE times, beginning in ninth grade and ending sophomore year of college. I kind of like it, but it is STILL very much a downer. Plus, it has a “Greek Chorus,” which to this day I don’t understand, because they hardly EVER sing anything.)

• Hamlet, King Lear, all the other Shakespearean tragedies: (Nope. No good can come of attempting to read these things. Fraught with death, betrayal, bad timing, poison, dead daughters—UGH. Also, fraught with an arcane language that makes you feel stupid when you try to read it because it’s like, “what the HELL does this mean? Is this even English?”)

• 1984 and Animal Farm (George Orwell is a great writer. And his stories have very powerful themes and get a young person thinking about government, anarchy, and free will. Which is good. What’s NOT good is the overall tone of doom and bleak sadness you’re left with as you have nightmares of what would be in your own personal Room 101. Not to mention you risk suffering a blow to the self-esteem if you to take the credo of “four legs good, two legs bad” to heart.)

And now I am about to add another book that is notorious for being dark when I go check out the book about a bunch of intellectual rabbits trying to flee their home that is about to be destroyed, and going to war with other rabbits...and dying. I hear lots of rabbits die in this book. What could be more fun than to spend a weekend reading a book about rabbit death!

Maybe I should consider reading a happier book instead. Like the Bible?