My life as a dork

On Saturday night Big-P and I went along to Special-K’s 30th birthday party for a few hours (between evening baby feeds) where we ate too much thai food, changed a car tire and then did a reasonable (not great, but reasonable) job of mingling with people who we have never met before. At one point in the evening I suggested to Big-P, Kent and Small that wouldn’t it be fun to start a book club. We could all takes turns in suggesting books and then read them and then get together and probably not discuss them in much detail. Actually I think I phrased it more like “Would you guys think I was a huge dork if I wanted to start a book club?”. Small immediately guffawed at me and told me that yes she would definitely think I was a big dork, and I couldn’t possibly start a book club and still be her friend. Kent was much more excited by the idea and immediately started recounting his theories on the latest book he is reading – (Tim Winton’s “Dirt Music”? I can’t remember now, that was one he mentioned anyway.) and I suddenly realised that having Kent in a book group would be too daunting… absolutely. Actually Big-P and Kent together in a book club would be a recipe for disaster. Historically (in various beach houses down Gippsland way) their esoteric discussions on literature have sent everyone else to bed early with dramatic eye-rolling. As someone who has had a mortifying, paralysing fit of stagefright in 1992 when attempting to give a paper in an English Literature tutorial on the Australian Writer Martin Boyd (infront of a lecturer who went on to write his biography, yikes) and had to be offered a bottle of water from a kindly fellow student so that I could get some words out of my completely dry mouth, my idea of a bookclub is not to go in for serious intellectual competition. I was hoping for a book club where the discussion went more along the lines of “oh yeah – I really liked that bit. It rocked. George Clooney could play that role if they made this into a movie”. Anyway… the idea fizzled as soon as I thought about it for more than a moment, but now I see that perhaps I wasn’t as big a dork as I thought I was! (via the wonderful 42short).