A particularly rambling and poorly thought out installment of the Halves and Half Knots is up today.

Long gone are the summer days where I would spend hours reading a book, sometimes reading one a day. 75 pages a day was a light day. Now, I’m lucky to read 74% of a page. Life changes and your priorities shift.

I was never exactly the wild child, unless you consider having three beers and wings with extra hot sauce on the side wild. However, my life these days makes my earl twenties self look like Charlie Sheen on a bender.

I miss the days where I would read non-stop. No matter the size of the book, no matter the subject, I’d devour it like it was a candy bar. And then move on to another one. Read, read, read.

I still have the desire and the need to do so. I just lack the time and ability to stay awake. One page into “Calculating God” last night and I was fast asleep. Like a baby. (On the flip side, my baby slept like an adult.)

It’s not like I’m not reading, though. I’m just not reading the books I want to read. The books that are sitting in a pile next to the bed, piled high enough to become a public safety hazard. (I think I’m up to roughly 22 or so). I slowly make my way through the pile but I just don’t have the time to read even a chapter a day.

These days I look at a books length as a measure of time. “488 pages? Geez, I won’t be done with that for eight months. Perhaps I should read this pamphlet on food poisoning. That’s only two nights worth of reading.”

I do read. I really do. It’s just I read as a performer now, and not as the primary audience. Matilda and I have always read together but now, it’s a ceremony and we have to make sure we have at least an hour set aside for it.

This summer, we’ve already burned through two of the Harry Potter books (there are four) and are on track to complete the third long before the school year starts. I read and provide voices and Matilda provides me with critiques on my performance.

“I feel Ron’s motivation was clear, but Hermione’s needs work. When you said, ‘totally barbaric’ I didn’t feel as though you meant it. You were just saying the words.”

Each morning I wake up to a set of notes that will guide the next evening’s performance. It wouldn’t be so bad if she hadn’t started wearing a beret and sitting in a canvas chair with her name on the back, demanding a double-cap-frap-half-caf-mocha-alpacino.

In all seriousness, the hour or so we spend reading Harry Potter is a joy. We’re both totally immersed in the world. So much so that we discuss everything throughout the day when I’m supposed to be working and she’s supposed to be playing.

“So, who do you think the Heir of Slytherin is?”

“Clearly it can’t be Harry. He doesn’t have Slytherin blood, does he? Malfoy denied it, but perhaps it is his father or maybe even someone who hasn’t been fully developed yet.”

And on and on. (By the way, the Heir of Slytherin was a complete surprise.)

The only problem is that summer is nearly over and soon we’ll be done with the third book. What will we do then? She’ll be focused on school and I’ll have to start focusing on “Calculating God” or some other silly physics based story that purports that you can find proof of the Creator in the basic laws of Physics.

If that’s true, and there is a Creator and he is, in fact, trapped in the laws of Physics . . . he’s saying, “Dude a body at rest stays at rest and, you know what? Creating a universe is tiring. I’m on break.”