Ohhh, a blog. I guess this is where I'm going to have to start on my pathway to replacing Chelsea Handler once she decides to run away with that hunky, knight in shining armor she's been dating lately: 50 Cent.
So instead of making this a "pilot post" and therefore forcing it to be equally as boring as every pilot TV show on the planet, I'm just going to jump right in. My goal is to one day have a reality show. And I have to tell you, if Lindsey Lohan's sister and mom got one, it's just a matter of time. Reality shows can lead to book deals. Book deals can lead to becoming a writer. And being a writer leads to sleeping in and practically becoming Carrie Bradshaw from Sex In The City. Bingo. Ultimate goal in life.
If I were to chronicle my life, I'd call it "Ainsley Britannica". It doesn't make a lot of sense, but I really want to translate my life into an encyclopedia format, and we all know that Encyclopedia Britannica was the best brand. Which is why when we were poor, my family had "World Book".
My mom now decorates with the encyclopedias. She'll stack a few underneath a lamp to make it look as if we read them cover to cover. Like "what's your favorite book Margaret" and she's going to be like "oh, I'm really getting into 'N' right now. From 1993".
I have absolutely zero idea why we still have those books. Given I'm the youngest in the family at 25, no one's writing a research paper ever again in this family. And if you think I'm going to take the time to reference a 15 year old book versus Wikipedia, you've got another think coming. I don't know if you recall the amount of work it takes to MLA cite an encyclopedia, but I will tell you, you're going to be using the "hanging paragraph" format overtime.
My absolute favorite part of the encyclopedia trap is that you had to buy the “Update Book” every year. This came with all the updates from the year before. So if you needed to look up info on someone still living, you’d have to look at the original book, and then find your way through the cryptogram that is the update book. Every one of them.
And I still, to this day, cannot find my way around the update book. When I say "to this day” I mean “to the day that I was in 5th grade” because get real, I haven’t cracked them open since Al Gore invented the internet and we got a pipe of it at my house. AOL dial up style.
But the sad part of the death of the era of Encyclopedias is the elimination of the door to door creeper salesperson. Forever gone the days of letting a perfect stranger into your home, calling your husband on the phone to convince him that "$2000 for a lifetime of learning" is a sound investment. Forcing your children to write research papers they aren't required to write "to get your money's worth". Like the era of the South before the Civil War, the era of the encyclopedias is now, too, Gone With the Wind.
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