An Unhealthy Addiction

                It always starts innocently enough.  I say I'm just going to go watch some TV.  But that's where everything normal stops.  When I turn on the TV, instead of watching something that would make me a better human being, I watch something that even the weirdest people have probably never even heard of. 

                Goosebumps.

                Do I like it?  Of course not.  It's irritating and predictable and the characters are always so childish.  But if I really don't like it, why do I watch it almost every day?

                I would like to blame someone else.  Maybe my dad is to blame, after all, he was the one who thought we should have Netflix.  I could blame the lack of interesting TV shows.  But to be able to do that, I would have to finish watching all of the cooking shows I have recorded.  I could blame my sister.  She likes them too, well, that or she's a really great actor. 

                The funniest part is, they don't scare me.  I'm not just saying that to sound brave.  The only way they could scare me would be if I couldn't sleep (so pretty much every night) and I'd have nothing to do so I think about creepy things.  It doesn't make sense.  Four A.M., can't sleep, I'm sitting alone in a dark room and I think about creepy stuff. 

                But when I freak myself out, it isn't the pictures of the weird looking vampires from Goosebumps that I see.  I see the Other Mother from Coraline; I think too much about the man in the black suit from the Stephen King short story I read.  (It's in Everything's Eventual, I couldn't sleep for weeks after I read it);  I wonder if the shuffling in the dark is my cat or Capricorn struggling to free himself from my bookshelf; or maybe, reaching way back, Cluny the Scourge is making his rounds.    

                So what do I get out of these shows?  They barely entertain me, they don't scare me, they never tell you the ending.  Why do I insist on watching them?

                Maybe I have too much spare time.  But judging from the number of library books I have, I should be reading all day. 

                So if it's not that I have too much free time, and it's not that I secretly like them (because no matter what everyone thinks I still do not like them), what is it? 

                The special effects are terrible, I make fun of the plot lines (which, by the way, are terrible), but it's still one of the most watched things on my Netflix queue.  I even watched The Nightmare Room on Chiller-The Nightmare Room is like Goosebumps, but it's been made recently, at least, I think it was. 

                I should be writing.  I should be cleaning my room.  I should be doing something interesting.  I could bake soufflé, I could watch Doctor Who (seen all of the recent ones, can't wait for the Christmas special - perhaps no Goosebumps that day).  But no, I watch Goosebumps. 

                I'm happy to say that I only have a few unwatched episodes left, so soon I'll stop watching them.  I hope...

What I've learned from reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

                Did you know that there's one food that's in almost everything we eat?  I didn't know until I read The Omnivore's Dilemma.  Corn is in almost every food we eat, especially processed food.  Think about it, the cereal you eat for breakfast probably has corn syrup; the soda you drink at lunch is mostly corn; even the meat you eat for dinner (if you eat meat) is made of corn.  The cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, and even the fish that people eat all ate corn.  So, of course, the meat is made of corn, too. 

                But corn isn't just in food, it's in cosmetics.  It makes the cover of your magazine shiny.  Corn is in fireworks and printer ink.  Corn covers more acres of land than any other living thing.  Even humans. 

                Forty-seven percent of all the corn grown in America is used to feed animals.  But cows should eat grasses, not corn.  When cows are in feedlots, they have to eat antibiotics to stay healthy because it is so dirty and their diets are so bad.  If the cows aren't healthy, how is the meat healthy?  Well, it's not.  Meat from a grass-fed cows is healthier than the meat from a cow who ate corn.  In feedlots, cows even eat bits of other cows.  That's wrong. 

                I didn't know how terribly the animals in feedlots were treated.  If I wasn't a vegetarian before I read this book I would be now.  I won't go into details about what happens to the animals in feedlots, but it's not good.  There isn't even a rule for how much bacteria can be in the meat.

                The part that I found the worst (well, one of the worst parts, all the things about the meat industry were pretty awful) was that humans keep making more efficient ways to kill things.  No other species does that!  Sure, cats eat meat.  So do dogs and a bunch of other animals.  But only humans have entire buildings devoted to murder. 

                In farms, if chickens peck other chickens, they get their beaks cut off.  If pigs bite the tails of other pigs, they get most of their tails cut off.  They only take most of the tail so that the next bite will hurt more.  They do that to "teach the pigs not to get bitten."  Cruel. 

                Twenty cows an hour suffer a painful death.  If those numbers alone are not enough of a reason to think the modern meat industry is cruel, let me put it a different way.  Five percent of cows killed every hour die a terrible, painful death.  To the people who run slaughterhouses, that's okay. 

                Do you know what protein meal is?  It's the bits of animals that people don't eat, all mashed together and fed to other animals.  This isn't so bad if the animal is a carnivore.  But can you imagine eating your own kind if you were a vegetarian - say a hen or a cow?

                Don't even get me started on fast food.  In 1960 a serving of McDonalds French fries only had two-hundred calories in it.  Now, fifty-three years later, it has five-hundred.  It has over double the number of calories it had fifty years ago. 

                One of the chemicals in chicken nuggets is a suspected cause of cancer.  Why is that in there?  Chicken nuggets also have lighter fluid either in them or on the box to preserve freshness, but if humans eat too much of it, they'll die.  Six chicken McNuggets contain twice as much fat as a regular hamburger.  Since McDonald's is selling chicken nuggets in twenty packs, it's like they're trying to make people sick. 

                Koalas used to eat more than just eucalyptus leaves.  Now that they only eat one thing, their brains are smaller because they don't have to think about what they eat.  What about humans?  If we eat mostly corn does that mean that our brains will get smaller too?  If it does, will there be a small group of people who didn't just eat processed food and corn who still have a full-sized brain?  What does this mean for the future of humanity?  I don't know. 

                Some "free-range" chickens are kept in a barn for most of their lives, then they have the option to go outside.  But they're already so used to living in the barn that they don't want to go outside.  Often, by seven weeks old-when they're killed-the chickens can't even walk anymore.  Why do people feel okay eating this? 

                Another thing I learned is that only one percent of mushrooms are safe to eat.  Some mushrooms have false mushrooms that look exactly like them but they'll make you sick. 

                I really learned a lot about food when I read this book.  I would recommend it to anyone who's curious about where their food comes from.  

My Kindle Lies

When I was reading Artemis Fowl on my Kindle, I checked to see how long it predicted it would take me to finish the book.  That's just another weird feature my Kindle has.  It said four hours.  Well, I'd be able to finish that in one day!  Four hours later, I hadn't finished it.  I even stayed up really late so I could read it.  The next day I read for an hour.  The next day I read for three and a half hours.  A few days ago I read for about four hours during the day and then a few more hours before I went to bed. 

When I was getting ready for bed, I looked to see how long it would take me to finish the book.  Thirty six minutes.  I almost wanted to read slowly to savor the last thirty-ish pages in the book.  I read really fast after [SPOILER] Butler got attacked by the troll and almost died because I had to see what happened [END SPOILER] but I will admit I considered putting my Kindle in a desk drawer and forgetting about it for three years.  However, I do have a paperback version of the book and nothing could have stopped me from reading it, not even a character almost dying. 

Anyway, I started reading at ten thirty and read until eleven.  I wasn't done.  I wasn't even near done.  I still had twenty seven minutes left.  What?  I had read for half an hour, I should have been nearly done.  At that point I hadn't slept well for a week and I had to go to sleep soon.  But I was reading Artemis Fowl, nothing could have stopped me from finishing it.  Not even sleep.  I even read during meals.  I was unstoppable. 

I read for another half hour.  Not done then, either.  So I read for another hour.  Then, after two hours of almost nonstop reading, I was done. 

So, either I fell asleep sitting up holding my Kindle and didn't notice or move for a about half an hour, or I was daydreaming way more than I realized.  Or I did that thing where it feels like I blink and then it's a few hours later.  I'll never know for sure. 

I've learned a valuable lesson:  If my Kindle says I'll be reading for an hour it actually means four.  Lovely.  Another thing I've learned from this experience is that I need to finish reading the series and I can't stop thinking about it until I do. 

Make sure you remember one thing if you have a Kindle Touch:  They lie. 

From now on I'm only going to be able to trust one thing on my kindle:  Time.  The actual clock time.  And I might not even be able to trust that because after daylight savings time stopped I never got around to resetting the time.  Now my Kindle is a completely unreliable storage unit for virtual books, imaginary books if you will.  At least I still have real books on real paper on a real shelf with a real clock by my bed.  

I want to like it!-Books that just weren't right

Sometimes I need a specific book for a specific mood.  That means that getting books out of the library can be hard because I never know what book I'll want.  My mood can change daily, even hourly.  I can be worse than my cat who asks you to pet her and then turns to kill for doing so.  One day I'll be in the mood for a light happy romance and the next I'll be reading some depressing novel written in poetry.  Here is my list of books I want to like, but just read at the wrong time. 

School Spirit by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel-I want to like it!  I want to like it a lot!  I know so many people who read the series and loved it.  I want to read it and not think about how I could never identify with the main character at all.  EVER.  I found it at a library book sale, and now it has a warm, happy home on my windowsill acting as insulation. 

The Girl Behind the Glass by Jane Kelley-When I found this book on Goodreads, it seemed creepy and exactly like something I would want to read.  I got it from the library and I was even more excited when I found that it was sort of told by the thing (ghost?) that lives in the house!  Exactly like something I'd read and love.  But, as I said, it was sort of told by the thing. At least, I think it was but I don't know.  I didn't finish the book.  I flipped ahead to see how it ended.  That was it.  I was done.  It started to get a little repetitive and I wished it would just wrap it up.  Without me wrapping it up myself. 

The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi-This was recommended to me by one of my friends.  I got it at Summer Reading last June.  I read about fifty pages and stopped.  I still haven't picked it up again.  I want to like it.  I really liked the Spiderwick Chronicles when I was six.  And I always want to give books by authors I like a chance.  It has a little too much robots-rule-the-world stuff going on to really catch my attention. 

Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage-(I'm going to try to keep my complaining to three sentences.  Here I go.)  I could not identify with the main characters.  I expected it to be magical, and it wasn't.  I tried to read it twice and I couldn't do it.  (I can't only do three sentences, sorry.)  The main characters stole a boat.  Stole a boat.  I wouldn't do that!  Not in a million years!  Then they returned the boat to the man they stole it from and took the reward.  I'm not anything like them. 

Perhaps someday I will try these books again when the mood strikes me.