Did you know I hated reading? Let me explain....

The life I remember from many years ago is still picture clear in my mind. The endless days of watching such as Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Animal Planet (the list could go on). On school days, I would be practicing my talent to look busy and when my eyeballs weren't glued to the television, I would hide myself from everyone and play with my imaginary friends, entering a world of witches and princesses previously seen in dramatic Disney movies. My efforts to go unseen were always short lived because of major interruptions such as my mother yelling at me for trying to skip my chores. Whoops!

With in time, things changed unknowingly. Before there was no one who could have made me really read books. 

I hated reading. 

No way, no how, could anyone ever

make me read a real chapter book. 

I preferred picture books, like the ones on the second floor of the old Public Library, under the children section where one can always find mothers with their infants, reading picture books to their children. 

But sometimes there are certain people, who make such a big impact in your life. 

Their entrance is too grand to be left unnoticed, like a dirty house that was left squeaky clean. 

My father had that effect on me. He encouraged me to take bigger leaps, to challenge myself everyday, and engage myself in something more potent than just squandering away my fragile future. 

He would cut up newspaper articles and have me read them, then write a short summary on them or look up the words I didn't understand and come up with a sentence for every word I didn't understand.

Every day he’d assign a, what I thought was a “stupid” (there were some other pretty colorful words but I'm keeping it PG) task because I’d always resist and rebel against his so called teachings. When he saw that I was defying him, he misinterpreted my rebelliousness as a fact that perhaps I was getting bored (Well DUH!) and thus changed his techniques. He no longer had me write summaries of stupid and totally uninteresting newspaper clippings but instead, he introduced me to the art of reading an actual book. Yes. A REAL book. With no Pictures!

The first time I saw the book I was going to read, 

all hell broke loose. 

I was overly optimistic and angry that my father had chosen not only a 309 page big, thick, hard bind book, but an overwhelmingly difficult vocabulary book (some words not even in the English dictionary because they were British slang or other). As for the book, he thought that the first Harry Potter book, The Sorcerer’s Stone, would be appropriate for me. 

In the beginning, like every good novel, was the introduction the one in which, my father and I read together. And because I was am stubborn like that, the whole process went at an excruciating, slow, pace, making it as painful for him as it was for me. My dad had a whole bucketful of patience for me, even going over new words and techniques on how we can find out their meaning without the use of a dictionary.

Little by little, I began to complain less and less and actually began to look forward to the next session. But being the ever impatient brat that I was am, I realized that I could actually read ahead instead of waiting to see what young Harry was going to do. I would go to the bathroom, the only room in the entire house with a lock on it, and secretly continue reading. Before I knew it I was hooked, like a junkie who’s found a new stupendous drug that makes him feel great. Amazingly enough, I finished the book in three days, all by myself and I wanted more! I wanted to read the continuation of Harry’s adventures so I read the second book even bigger than the last one. Then another, and then another. 

What I hadn't realize at that point was that my father made me appreciate the reading and not to mention, writing, using the same imagination I had to conjure my imaginary friends and heroes. The same imagination which bloomed and broadened, creating characters only I could visualize until I wrote them on paper. 

I even tried writing my own novel, many times, beginning first with short stories then stretching the stories with more intricate detail, always thinking to myself, "It needs more action, more talk," things that I, once the reader, know I wanted to see. My novel began with at a fast pace and by the time I realized it I had already written sixty something pages, all of my own creation.

Unfortunately, like an amateur novelist, I had failed to see a reason to save the files on a floppy disk (Yes, floppy disk. That's how long ago this was), and mainly thought that just being in my computer would do. As it was, I was working on my novel when a blackout occurred completely frying the motherboard (I had a really old piece of crap computer) when the power was back on. Thus, my story was lost, and I could do nothing but begin a new story, written in hand because I had lost faith in my computer (besides, it was completely dead. I couldn't even turn it on). 

This nostalgia of submerging myself in a make-believe world that the author had created just for me, felt like it was a part of my life that I had been looking for and had never really found it until I opened the covers of an old, dusty, and certainly smelly library book. For me and for the sake of my family (who always fought with me for the remote control) this was a legendary moment. Reading and writing was, and still is a big part of my life. I had crossed a bridge of knowledge and was more than ready to dive further into deep pools of wisdom. 

I guess in normal terms, I grew up.