Too Many Potato Chips

I think I'm addicted to self-gratification. If any of you have ever eaten a meal with me, you may have already picked up on this fact, seeing as how, no matter who you are, I can eat faster than you. I have many memories of guests in our home sitting down to dinner, getting all ready to take their first bite of food and looking up in surprise when the entire Romney clan were slurping up their final bites already. Fast. Pretty much, I'm a gobbler, and sadly, the habit is not limited to food alone. I am also an incurable book gobbler. Every time I'm really looking forward to a book, I promise myself that this time, for sure, I will read it slowly and enjoy it. Savor it. So I pick it up, start the first chapter, and then it's already too late. At each chapter ending I promise myself, just one more! I can stop any time I want, just one more chapter! (Please don't ever let me get my hands on anything alcoholic, by the way.) It's just like going through a bag of potato chips.  One is never enough.

I trust you know what book I have consumed in one gulp this time. Of course, it's the new Stephenie Meyer book, "Breaking Dawn." But it's just so much worse than you think. Now, before I confess everything, you must understand that I have spent days and days away from home, unable to attend to my regular duties. (But let's be honest, I would have totally neglected them anyway.) So, I was staying at The Becky's house last week.  It was Thursday night, and I was all set to go to a midnight party with my friend Misty the following night for the book release.  I realized that I wasn't feeling very excited, and decided to pick up Twilight, the first in the series, to get back in the spirit of things.  Let the bingeing begin.  I couldn't help myself - I got totally caught up all over again in the whole story and ended up re-reading all three books, and then went straight into the fourth, finishing quite early this morning, and am still riding the high from the immense literary caloric intake.  

You know, it can't be healthy to do this.  I could tell that immediately when yesterday, as my children were climbing the walls with boredom, I took them for an outing to Farm Country at Thanksgiving Point.  It was "2 Dollar Tuesday," and so the entirety of both the valley to the north and the valley to the south had emptied simultaneously into Thanksgiving Point.  Too many people, not worth the savings, just so you know.  Anyway, there I was, lugging around my stupid shoulder bag because I had to bring the book with me in case I found a moment of reading time.  I didn't.  But in the meantime, I kept looking around at all the moms just like myself and thinking, "Look at all these weak and hideous mortals!"  Yeah, perhaps it's time to pull my nose out and get a life.  Maybe that's the good part of snarfing down these books so fast - it's over so soon, so I am not absent from reason, sanity or reality for too long. Any more than usual, that is. At least I'm not getting fatter from this kind of over-consumption.  Though I suppose sitting on the couch all day isn't helping much.