Holidaze.

Not the most original title for a post, but here I am, back home, and overwhelmed with all that the New Year is hurling my way. Nothing bad, just the usual work that I need to get caught up on after two deliriously blissful weeks off. The fact that I have been sick for the whole time - and that I had to spend the night before Christmas Eve in a hotel in Detroit due to snowstorms that caused me to miss my connection - did little to dampen the sheer pleasure of reading (books! Several of them!) and of watching t.v. (whole seasons of shows!) and of knitting (a scarf (re-knit about four times until I got it right) and two dischcloths!) and of eating (many boxes of cookies!) and of playing in the snow with Bean (!). The only things I did not get to do that I had been looking forward to doing were:

1) going to the gym (due to my cold); and

2) going to the coffee shop with my laptop and deleting all my old emails.

(This last may not sound like a big deal to you, but as a card-carrying OCD'd person, lemme tell you, the thought of that makes my eyes roll back in my head and my tongue to loll. In a good way.)

So, I read not only some of the books I received for Christmas -

- which included Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (which I enjoyed; in addition to it being a great read, Ellen Forney's illustrations are awesome (and you know what, I recently discovered that we actually went to college together, although I'm pretty sure I never knew her while I was there. At the same time, however, I do, have this nagging feeling that we may have been in the same small Lesbian Studies class...) and Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman's
Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (which, so far, I'm kinda "meh" about - when I finish it, I'll have to write more about it) -

- but also some of the books I gave as gifts, including Ryan Knighton's Cockeyed: A Memoir and Firoozeh Dumas' Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America.

I even made it through another third of the The Book That Would Not Be Finished, also known as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia on the flight home. I've been reading this book off and on, mostly off, since August, and I just finished the India part, which I think I liked better than the Italy part, even though some of her descriptions of self-sacrifice for religious rapture were a bit off-putting. I'm a few pages into the Indonesia stories, and I suspect that, despite how unmotivated I've been to finish it, it will end up being a book I will recommend to others. Heck, I recommend it now. Go read it.

The book I meant to bring with me to read but forgot at home is The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon. If someone had said to me, "hey, you should read this book. It's about a guy who set himself on fire when he was a kid," I'd probably have said, "no, thanks." But I found it in the memoir section of a great used bookstore and had to buy it. During the same week, I also bought Barrie Jean Borich's My Lesbian Husband at the original Amazon Bookstore. I picked up this book purely by chance; it did not seem on the surface to be something that I would necessarily want to read, only because I've read so many books already that seem like they could fit under the title of "My Lesbian Husband,", like, wow, yet another book about lesbian relationships, or maybe another about a lesbian couple in which one had transitioned - not uninteresting or unimportant topics at all, but just ones I had read a lot about already. It just didn't grab my interest, but I picked it up, anyway, and I opened it up to page 118 and I read these sentences:

"When I asked Linnea what does it mean to wear a ring of promise, I did not fail to see her bright and beckoning face, did not fail to know that I was more than a boozy blaze of a girl imagined by a famous alcoholic homosexual who died too young, did not miss the fact that Linnea was no stock-studio savior positioned in the back of a cutaway cab. She was real husband material, reaching for ways greater than words to say she loved me. It is just that I wanted to know who would write the story of this tempered metal I should wear so close to the skin. The ring was not an idea that Linnea and I imagined between us."

Readers, I was blown away by this prose. And I bought the book purely because of those lines. I have no idea whether or not I'll like the book, but I couldn't ignore the beauty of Borich's writing.

I also mentioned t.v. watching. I finally got to see the second season of Weeds, so now I'm only one season behind. Hopefully, the Season 3 DVD will be available shortly. (I'm hearing good things about The Wire, now that the series is about done, so I'll have to start watching that, now, too. Apparently, I can get it from On Demand.) I also saw the first season of 30 Rock, which I had zero interest in before, and which I can't get enough of, now. And of course, I watched the obligatory several episodes of The Sopranos, because that's just good television.

Bean and I and a few others got to sled in the backyard and have snowball fights, the latter of which also involved a lot of laughing and tackling and falling down in the snow. Delightful times!

Also, because my folks still have a dial-up internet connection, I got to play many, many games of Solitaire and Golf while waiting for various pages to load.

So it was a good, restful, even productive two weeks (I even did some planning for this semester), but now I am hit with that bad feeling one gets when one returns from a vacation. Like, "Holy Shit, I have a lot to do!!!"

So today's plan, now that it's almost 1:30pm:

1) Get dressed.

2) Hit McDonald's.

3) Go to the office to do a couple of quick things that can only be done there.

4) Go grocery shopping.

5) Come home and watch t.v. while making lists of things I will commence doing tomorrow.

Happy New Year, y'all.