jingle!

Happy Christmas to all. It'll be over in 40 minutes. Fell asleep last night thinking of falling asleep Christmas eves when I was little and how impossible it was. My sister and I were always so excited. She reminded me yesterday we used to play Chinese checkers into the wee hours to make ourselves fall asleep. Greedy little girls. Ha! And I remembered myself that we'd wait eagerly at the top of the stairs until the time we'd agreed on with our parents when we were allowed to rush the tree and all our gifts. Today was nice: slept in late, exchanged gifts with immediate family, ate amazing meal prepared by mother and father with cousins, aunt, family friends, went to see Juno (which was pretty good), beat mother and sister at scrabble, worked on grad school applications, read. I am reading a book I got today, a book I asked for, someday this pain will be useful to you by Peter Cameron. I was intrigued when I read a review for it in the NYT that lauded Cameron for writing such an insightful, complex young narrator for this book, which has been labeled "YA". The review said adults might even get more out of it than "young adults". A passage I just read that I liked:

"I am disturbed," I said. I thought about what the word meant, what it really means to be disturbed, like how a pond is disturbed when you throw a rock into it or how you disturb the peace. Or how you can be disturbed by a book or movie or the burning rain forest or the melting ice caps. Or the war in Iraq. It was one of those moments when you feel you have never heard the word before, and you cannot believe it means what it means, and you think how did this word come to mean that? It seemed like a bell or something, shining and pure, disturbed, disturbed, disturbed, I could hear it pealing with its true meaning, and I said, as if I had just realized it, "I am disturbed."

And my fortune of the tag of my Yogi tea bag:

To learn, read.
To know, write.
To master, teach.

Hm.