11.10.2008

Some Days

Today was a bad kind of day.
Here are some things that went horrendously wrong:

1. I failed my Italian oral exam. Well, maybe not failed but my Professor patted me on the back at the end, so I took that as a negative sign.

2. I wore shoes that were not water-proof and it poured rain all day. They went through my socks and so I was freezing and wet all day long.

3. The saddest part of my day was my drive home from Alpine. It was pitch black and I completely rammed into a deer. I felt so bad for it I sat in my car and cried for about fifteen minutes before I called my Mom or checked the front of my car to see what the damage is. Poor little deer, I hope it is still alive, even though it was a reckless deer who ran into me. I feel so bad for it.

But my day livened up a little because I stopped at Chef's Table on my way home and the lady saw I was crying so she gave me a giant box of mashed potatoes for $3.23 and then I watched 90210 on my computer in my pajamas. Tomorrow is a new day, with no mistakes in it. (and hopefully no dead deer)

11.01.2008

Book Friends

I have a lot of friends. I am one of those people, divinely gifted, to have friends everywhere I go. I have all kinds of friends too. Friends I like to shop with, friends I like to eat with, friends I like to study with. There are friends who have sleepovers with me, and we share our deepest secrets, and friends who laugh at me when I do something ridiculous and love me anyway. I have energetic friends, pessimistic friends, sarcastic and hilarious friends.

But I also have book friends.

These friends are special friends, and hard to come by. In a sense, they understand everything I am saying without me having to say anything at all. They understand my obsession with Caleb Trask, and my fascination with India after reading both Elizabeth Gilbert and Jhumpa Lahiri. They don't mind when I tell them about my new favorite Anne Sexton poem and a tear slides casually down my cheek, and they don't judge me when I cancel my weekend plans to start the fourth book of the Sisterhood series. They have an unfathomable crush on Rudy Steiner and Gilbert Blythe too, and they wish that Cold Mountain had a different ending. They eagerly awaited the Seventh Harry Potter for literature's sake, and that book dominated our lunches for months following. My book friends and I may have nothing else in common - except our bridged obsession with characters, and stories, and villages and castles far away from our own. They understand Kafka when he said, "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul." They smiled when Kate and Richard worked things out, and laughed at Rachel's humor in the Congo. They even cried aloud when Hans Huberman's accordion was found, and giggled when Ramona cracked the raw egg on her head.

They understand the canon, because they live it.
Every day when they open their books.