Reading Week? What is this ‘reading’ you speak of?

Let’s see… in all the years I’ve been at UBC, what have I done with my Reading Breaks?

2008: Participated in the UBC Learning Exchange Reading Week Project, which I highly recommend doing at least once in your time here.

2009: Jet-set across Canada to visit my UofT friends. I think we actually did study together one day of that week, so that counts as having done my reading, no?

2010, AKA the two-week Olympics break: Flew to New York for the first week to visit my friend there and came back the second week with the intention of getting all my homework done, but not doing any of it at all. I think I was watching the Olympics and just lazing about. I really should have just stayed in New York that second week as well.

2011: Went skiing for the first weekend (which doesn’t really count as Reading Week), went to work for the first half of the week, and developed mysterious food allergies in the second half of the week. My hives were horrendous, and neither the doctor nor I have any clue what could be causing them, since I haven’t done or eaten anything new. Am currently on antihistamines that are the equivalent of sleeping pills, my friends tell me. I’ve been trying valiantly to do some of my readings, but I can’t honestly tell you how effective this is.

Lesson learned (all too late)? Just take a break from school and don’t give myself the extra guilt of ‘I should be doing reading’. Old habits die hard; it’ll never happen. Clearly the hives are Nature’s way of enforcing this ban on reading upon me.

(In other news, I just started a new blog keeping track of a whole other kind of reading.)