two dolla

find me by rosie o’donnell

Guess who’s been reading this summer? Yeah, me! Don’t worry, because I’m surprised, too! It must have started with the David Sedaris books my cousin suggested, and from there, it took off. I’ve read more books this summer than I have in the past three years.

Reading, since probably high school, has been really hard for me. Obviously, I know the words and I know what they mean, but it’s just hard for me to sit with a book for more than a chapter or two and really comprehend what I’m reading. I’d rather read the sports page of the newspaper and memorize stats or a bunch of entertainment websites to find out which celebrity is sleeping with their best friend’s ex-boyfriend/girlfriend. I don’t know why it’s that way, but it explains a lot – school, college, training materials, etc.

Not only do I want to start reading, but I need to start reading. The true-crime books I used to swap back and forth with my grandma kept my interest really well, so I knew I had to find something to start with that would really draw me into the book.

Find Me by Rosie O’Donnell is one of the first books I read this summer. I’d been reading Rosie’s blog for a while now, so when she casually mentioned her book in a post she’d made, I figured I’d give it a shot.
I finished the book in less than a week. I read every word in every chapter and even used a bookmark. To me? That’s huge progress.

I don’t really know what I was expecting when I opened the book. It wasn’t humor and a laugh a minute like Ellen’s book, because I knew it wasn’t a book that was meant to generate laughs. Like the title says, it was a book about the author trying to find herself.

The book does skip around – from her childhood, to being a mother, and from being extremely involved in her own charities, to wondering how the success and failures of her life look to her mother that died at an early age. It’s all there in not that many pages at all.

By reading this book, you see more than the former talk-show host obsessing about Tom Cruise and McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. You see what she’s escaping when she was filming the highly successful show for the few years it was still running.

I learned a lot from this book. I learned you can’t hide how you’re feeling or who you are from your true friends; they just know. I learned it’s okay to be yourself and not model your life and actions after what you think other people want; it’s not there life, is it? I learned other things that I’ll keep private, because it’s just as important for me to understand and learn things internally as it is externally.

I also learned that I like reading again, and this book was the first of many that I cracked up this summer. And yes, I left them on the bathroom sink, because that’s where I do most of my reading, okay?

on a 1-10 scale, cleaning ranks a -8970

We got an email at work today letting us know that we would be having some special guests in the building on Wednesday and Thursday, so we should try to make our workspaces look presentable. In other words, I had to clean my desk today. Anyone that’s known me for any amount of time can tell you, without hesitation, that I am not the neatest person in the world.  Cleanliness may be meant to be next to Godliness, but for me it’s probably closer to as enjoyable as scratching my eyeballs with a yard rake.

I just spent the last hour sorting through the mounds of crap that filled my L-shaped desk. Two boxes of instant oatmeal went into my bottom righthand drawer, joining an unopened bottle of Diet Pepsi Jazz, my headphones, and my work softball jersey. My Excederin Migraine and orange-flavored Tums got pitched into my top righthand drawer, which was still housing my winter supplies from last year – stocking cap with ear flaps, cough syrup, and zinc lozenges. I’m keeping the generic Vicodin out just for dramatic effect.

I threw eight Sharpies, four blue pens, and six blue and orange highlighters into a wicker basket I have on my desk for some reason. Right now, that sole reason is to hold my collection of unuses post-it notes, my Steve Bedrosian and Chris Bosio baseball cards, and a copy of Mr. & Mrs. Smith on DVD.

The four empty water bottles that were on my desk found their way into the trash. I’m not sure why it was so hard to part with them, but I keep looking longingly into my wastebasket to make sure they’re alright.

For about two seconds I thought about trying to combine the two steno notebooks and the legal pad I use to take various notes into one, but I thought better of it. My scatterbrain needs things scattered – that’s just how it works.

To most people, my desk/workspace probably still seems unpresentable. I know for a fact, though, that if I try to put my whiteout, stapler, calculator, tape dispenser, and book of checks into a drawer, I may not be able to properly function.

I wish someone would send a letter to my house, saying importnat people were coming by and I would need my apartment to look presentable. I’m not sure what other reason I have to remove the three loads of laundry that are sitting on my dining room table.