I'm not quite sure why this is. It may be because of all the TV adds I saw that tried to promote reading and portrayed the illiterate as a handicapped population. It may be that the movies, television programs and books I read featured illiterate low-class. It must also be because of the fact that I learned to read at such a young age. Being illiterate simply seemed impossible to me. I couldn't wrap my head around how someone could go their entire life without learning, or at least trying to learn, how to read.
Well, here I am. I'm almost 27. And I am half illiterate.
This past Sunday, I took Israel's Hebrew Proficiency Exam. We'll see whether I pass. It's been three years since I've moved to Israel- three full years of living my life in Hebrew, and yet, I do not read. Or, rather, I read at a very elementary level.
Now, on the one hand I feel extremely shameful. I don't ever push myself to read, I haven't been strong enough to carve out a time each day in which I sit down to read, and I certainly don't make a point of trying to read the news in Hebrew. I'm lazy. And this is how I approach most things in life. I am incredibly lazy.
I sit around and watch movies. I go out and get drunk on the weekends. I get home with plenty on my mind, and instead I make food or dabble around on facebook, peeking in on others lives in order to make myself depressed. I read and write e-mails, deluding myself that I'm doing something productive. At yet, at the end of the day, I haven't done anything I can say I'm at all proud of.
Everything seems meaningless. I'm not quite sure when I lost my interest in the world, but it's happed very quickly. I feel incapably of writing well, incapable of applying myself to serious critical reading, and incapable of doing anything interesting.
I flip through the facebook pages of my friends who are pursuing a dream. Well, I never really had a dream. I never really knew what it was I wanted or how I was supposed to know this in the first place. What are these "passions" that people have? Why don't I ever feel passion? The kind of passion that propels and excites?
So I'm back to square one. My impotence. My illiteracy. My inability to follow through.
The end.
