Once upon a time..

When I was in the 2nd grade, my teacher held a contest to encourage her students to read.  Whenever one of us completed a book, she would put a marble into the mason jar that was on our desks.  At the end of the year, the marbles would be tallied and the winner with the most would get a pizza party for their desk group on the last day of school.

There was a girl in my class who was always boasting about her reading accomplishments.  She would proudly count her marbles out loud and comment on our meager collections, predicting her future victory.  I didn’t like her because she had always picked on me for being awkward and dorky, so I decided that I was going to win just to spite her.

Over the next few months, I went to the library nearly every weekend and checked out the maximum books they’d let me have – ten.  I read everything I could get my hands on, including the entire series of both Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys.  I diligently filled out the required ditto worksheet and got my mother to sign them, compiling them in a carefully guarded, secret stack.  I let the girl continue to brag about her jar having the largest volume of marbles; I let her think she was going to win.  Then, on the last week of school when the deadline hit for reading credit, I turned in my pile of book reports and collected my enormous bounty of marbles.

I beat her by almost 200 books.  She was so upset that she cried.

The moral of the story is: if you pick on the nerd for being a nerd, she is going to outnerd you.  (Actually, the moral of the story is probably that I’m a terrible person for relishing the time I made a seven year old girl cry, but after that…)

I feel that story is a very good representation of who I am today: nerdy, hungry, and pathologically spiteful.  And — more relevant to the site I suppose — that I  am an enthusiastic reader with an unquenchable thirst for non-fiction.  In addition to my small personal library, I also have a Kindle that I carry around everywhere so I always have reading at my fingertips.

…Plus I’ve been conditioned to believe that nerdery leads to delicious pizza, so now I’m like Pavlov’s dog for books.