Laundry Nights, Late-Night Reading, and Perpetuity of Today

Another trifecta of of topics to be blogged in my title. Aye. I'm good at those. It's like those five-paragraph essays that are so standard they have to be bad, but really, they aren't, sometimes. Anyway

Laundry Nights are what I'm planning to call my bimonthly, or maybe even weekly, bouts of voluntary insomnia. Like most of you've already heard, there are days (or rather, nights) where I just don't sleep. Most of the time I'm horribly disheveled and tired, but not today. Yes, I pulled an all-nighter yester-to-day (haha, pun). I had to do laundry (at three in the morning, yes), and instead of the usual plethora of things I bring to entertain myself (computer and various wires, knitting, reading for class, etc etc), I just brought a book I bought the past week (a small book-shopping excursion on my birthday): Houssini's second book A Thousand Splendid Suns. I was actually hesitant about buying it, since second books never really match up to the first. A fellow dormmate recommended it, and trusting my Berkelians, I bought it. And so don't regret it. It was a slow page-turner. As in, it's a page turner, but the action builds like a lazy creek, as opposed to Dan Brown's fast page-turner. Comprende? Anyway, it was brilliant, and I finished it in one sitting during and long after I finished my laundry. I started in at around four-thirty in the morning, and finished at eight-fifteenish. A brilliant, touching, shuddering, heart-deep and bone-strong book. Maybe I found it so good because sleep-deprivation, but it was engrossing and comfortable, and such a relief! to read deeply and enjoyably. I haven't done that in a while. But the laundry room is such a comfortable place to spend my crazy insomnia impulses. It has bright lights, a warm atmosphere, a clean whiteness, that clean laundry smell, and the fuzzy white-noise hum of machines. So much better than the dim, dingy lounge with dirty carpet. So yes. I have designated Laundry Nights to be my now-comfortable insomnia hangout.

I've already covered my late-night reading, but the serious blogger in me wants a semi-concise book review, sort of. So. A Thousand Splendid Suns. It's still set in Afghanistan and the surrounding territory, and about the endless conflict the region has seen. This time, however, it's mostly a female protagonist cast, as unlike the platonic love of The Kite Runner, focuses on romantic love, and stays local. When I finished it, I wanted to weep, only because of the series of events that just keep happening--relentless like ocean waves. I couldn't put down the book; I wouldn't even notice the chapters passing. I was so starved for fiction; I should've savored and appreciated slowly, and read in sections, but I couldn't. I still savored the story, the bittersweet, the sharp, and the heavy sensuality, but I devoured it. Think of it this way. I luxuriously devoured the bursting peach. The image I associate with this hunger and enthusiasm. Of course I'm going back to reread it, languidly this time; maybe in bed, or laying on the floor of my room, under the soft, slanting afternoon night. Anyway, back to the book. My only irksome point, that I just realized, was that, despite the surprising disasters after another, it still played out a little predictably, and the inevitability of certain events dulled not just my spirits, but took the edge off the book. As well as the preachy/expose undertone. See, what went so spectacularly right in the first book was that it was the perfect blend of realism and romanticism and tasted so novel and new and endearing. It wasn't just a father-son/coming-of-age story; it was just the wholeness of it. All right, I'm officially rambling from lack of sleep.

So, last, philosophical-sounding part. Perpetuity of Today. It's just how, engrossed in a good book with it's own passage of time, in a lit room, and staying awake without the break of sleep to break the progression of time into 'yesterday,' 'today,' and 'tomorrow'...It's like it doesn't happen at all. Having witnessed the dark sky lighten, and heard the birds wake up and cause a royal racket among themselves, and then totter up the stairs to realize I'm beginning a new day? What? It's like time, or the day rather, stretched to eternityish for me. I look up and the sky's dark, and I look up again and the sky's light. But the date associated with the breaking day has no meaning for me since I didn't end yesterday with sleep.

Since I'm beginning to get a bit tiddly, so I'm going pack for my classes, and micronap.