Several months ago, it was hard not to notice just how many piles of entertainment media I had in my room. These piles had started accumulating a little over a year ago as my time just got completely sapped up with finishing my MA, but even after graduating I noticed that the piles just kept getting bigger and bigger. It wasn’t that I didn’t have free time, but I lacked the initiative to go through them for some reason. Granted, in some cases I was kind of dreading that I wouldn’t like things as much as I was hoping I would — particularly new CDs by Björk and Tori Amos — but a lot of this stuff was stuff that I actually wanted to listen to or see or read, and I just couldn’t force myself to go through them. Finally this past summer I did force myself to go through these piles, although I never did get through the DVD pile.

I’ve been trying to go through the DVD pile a bit at a time here, and a few days ago I finally finished going through the boxed set of Chef! which I’d been watching an episode or two at a time before going to bed. Chef! is one of those great British comedies that appeals to my darker, less nice side, and I hadn’t been able to watch it for several years since our local PBS station took it down due to viewer complaints about all the cursing in it. However, I can’t say that I was too thrilled to watch the final season, which I hadn’t watched before and had heard didn’t live up to the expectations set from the previous two seasons. Still, it was something of an accomplishment just for me to get all the way through that set, and now I can only hope that I can start going through the rest of my DVD pile in similar fashion.

That being said, all of a sudden I have a book pile starting again, and it looks like it’s only going to get bigger over the next several weeks. I’ve said before that for someone with two degrees in English, I seemed to play video games a lot more than read books when I was growing up. Now that seems to be changing, though. (Let’s forget my dancey games for a moment here, since for me they’re more exercise than video gaming.) I’ve got a lot of books that I really want to get through in my pile, not even counting stuff on my shelves that I’ve either never read or want to re-read. I just can’t seem to find enough time in my days to get through all this stuff, and considering my teaching load is being doubled next semester, I’m starting to wonder just how to make the most efficient use of my time. I’m certainly not doing a good job of it right now.