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Why do people feel the need to ask you if you are married--like it's expected. I don't walk around asking fat chiks if they're pregnant or old guys if they're impotent. I'd have every right too. Old guys are impotent. Pregnant chiks are fat. Yet it's not offensive to ask me if I'm married. That's such a bunch of baloney.

No, I'm not married. No, I don't expect to anytime soon.

The mere question makes me shudder and very uncomfortable. I am way too immature to get married. Old people get married. Grownups get married. Guys who play video games and like to burp are successful if they aren't living at home. Marriage--me? Yeah, sure--right after I run for president.

Here's a pointless personal horror story: I was doing something where I needed to find out how fast the average American reads. Numerous sites confirmed that the average adult reader covers 250 words a minute. Also in my quest, I discovered that the average book has about 250 words per page--which immediately started to freak me out. See, when I read, I normally read slightly more than a page per minute. Which meant that I--and this was so hard for me to phantom--I was average. Me. The super reader. I was in such shock that I felt pale. Here I was, going around thinking that I was better than everyone else when in all actuality, I was better than no one. All of those who were around me that marveled over my reading speed were actually idiots--people who read far below what's considered average.

I couldn't believe it--it didn't make sense. I decided to do a little research. Apparently there's a standard to estimating how many words per page a book has because all books are different. That 250 words per page is average. But for the wordy authors or publishing companies that wanna skimp on printed pages, those books might have more. Meanwhile talent-less hacks who have nothing really to say (I'm talking to you, Elmore Leonard) use a large font and more spacing to stretch out their tiny fiction into a novel-size length.

According to what I read, the way to determine words per page is to count the number of words in three consecutive full lines. Divide that total by three and multiple by the number of lines. I did this with a couple Dean Koontz and Stephen King books--including the one I'm reading right now. Sure, I might be reading at a one page per minute pace. But the books I read are man books--a whopping 600 words per page. I checked multiple pages within the same book and the numbers almost always came out to be the same: 600 words per page--two and half times the "average" book.

No wonder I'm only reading at an average per page pace: the pages are twice as long.

There's nothing as satisfying as confirmation that you are better than everyone else.

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