Balance and Groovin'

[this image ripped off of some random German myspace page that ripped it off from somewhere else]

I haven't posted lately due largely to feeling weirdly off-balance since just before T-Day. However, I finished my final paper for the Public Health Surveillance course I was taking at UNC Chapel Hill's School of Public Health, and although the wait to learn my fate grade-wise is excruciating, I am feeling more myself again and ready and able to start yowling in my room full of rocking chairs. Not that it was the paper that had me off-balance, I don't think, but absent a major stressor, it's easier to re-stabilize.

I finally finished a book I've been slogging through all summer (and it's winter now, hmmm), and took it off the current reading list, and looking at the list, it looks, well, off-balance. Great Dharma reading, sure, but that's it. So I'm going through my list on Amazon of books I've been meaning to buy, but don't have room (or $) for:

Friends of Interpretable Objects was a recommendation from Will, the guy who writes thinkbuddha.org. Not too expensive; definitely a contender.

I'm interested in Epidemiology of Aging, but it's a textbook, so quite expensive, and probably better combined with other readings in a class than as recreational reading.

I've deleted a couple things from the list, as just "nah."

Despite being a few years old, Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them looks pretty good, but I'm feeling a little plagued-out for the time being.

Amazon recommends for me The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (along with a bunch of other stuff that they apparently just had a quota to push), and I think I'd really like it, but it just makes me really want a Kindle so I can buy and read it without having to store it forever after or donate it somewhere and pray it finds a good home.

Made to Stick looks interesting and fun, but again I get that wish-I-had-a-kindle feeling. (I am so getting one when I have a real job and the 2.0 becomes available in February or whenever)

Mind Beyond Death looks awesome, but would not help my balance problem much.

Of course I have those tomes by Pynchon I've lost enthusiasm for. I started Mason & Dixon and it was just such a man's book. It's great that there is such a thing, why should chick-lit have all the fun, but seriously I thought, "Yeah, this is great, but still no."

The Amazon recommendations are disappointing really, which I suppose is to be expected. You buy or wish-list one book and they come up with other books like it for you to read. So they're basically encouraging people to read only within their already-established grooves, when for me and probably a lot of other people the whole point of recreational reading is to get out of my usual groove. I call it a groove rather than a rut because I don't think it's all bad to have a groove, a groove is groovy, yo, and groovin' is what we all want from life, at least most of the time. But of course it's a matter of balance, because too much groovin' makes a rut.

So here's hoping we're all groovin' just enough, not too much, as we head into the solstice and the longest night of the year. Just a couple weeks away now and then the light starts coming back.