"I don't believe in tiny Jewish Santa anymore." -Buffy

I'm back.

Our travel was hilariously disastrous, going to Washington and coming home. In each case, our first flight was delayed, causing us to miss our second flight. Coming home yesterday, door to door, took 10 1/2 hours--and it felt like 11 1/2 because we lost an hour through time-zone time-kidnapping. In the Vancouver airport, slouched like a delinquent across two seats, I felt like a woman without a country, or a home--the idea of my apartment seemed like something I had seen in a movie, that didn't belong to me. Anyway, we came home and now we're home and I don't know about you, but I'm happy to be home. I was getting pretty tired of the nonstop Washington drizzle.

I read four books and half of a fifth while at my parents'. One of these was Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, which I really enjoyed. My dad picked out this book for me, apparently on the basis that if I wrote a book, that's what it would be like. (According to him.) This book inspired me quite a bit, mainly in the sense that I want to write encyclopedic entries about things that do not belong in an encyclopedia. Such as:

My parents', visiting.
My parents moved into a new house a year and a half ago. Their new house is a weird combination of not-home and home, as I have never lived there and it is located in a country where I have also never lived, but it is full of familiar things, such as VHS tapes and towels and my dog. Every time I encounter something from my old life in my parents' new house, I am a bit astonished and taken aback, and I will say something to myself like: "that's weird, they still have these mugs?" In my mind, they have a completely different life, a completely different house, and completely different stuff, and evidence to the contrary baffles me.

If I were ambitious, there would be more of these, but as it is I think there may just be one.

Anyway, I highly recommend you read this book if you like non-reference-book type information arranged into reference books.

The other books I finished were Alberto Manguel's The City of Words, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (one of those YA books that's always getting banned/challenges/raved about, and I was kind of disappointed in it to be honest, and now having written that I'm probably going to get lots of angry email from Perks of Being a Wallflower fans telling me I just don't get it), and The Burned Children of America [edited by Zadie Smith]. The one that I am half-way done is Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is making me hungry for the farmer's market. Too bad it won't be open for, oh, right, five more months.

I put the new books I got for Christmas and my birthday into librarything, and it informs me I now own 498 books. 2 more to 500! And I have gift certificates! The 500th book should be something monumental, something that represents my whole reading life thus far. Maybe something Anastasia-related.

I'm feeling kind of glum, and I was hoping that my red-hot typing would somehow propel me ahead of my glumness, but it didn't work. I am going to spend the rest of the day watching the last 9 episodes of The X-Files, probably. Even though I know that in the long run that will make me more glum, because then I will have all my original glum-ness, plus a sense of lostness that results from finishing one's long-term DVD-watching goal.

I'm really in for it, Internet.