Sunday, August 31, 2014

Two Books

Melodrama warning:  This is about the two books that saved my life.

I should so not be writing a blog post right now.  It's late, and I have a lot of work to do tomorrow (and tonight, still!), but I assembled a shelfie on Dan Savage's instructions and put it on Facebook, and now I can't stop thinking about these books that saved my life, so now you're going to hear about them.

I read them both the same summer, when I was living in Thessaloniki and ostensibly doing research on the relationship between Greek Jews and Greek Christians during the early 20th century.  That research ended up requiring fluency in Greek, Hebrew, and Ladino (or Judeo-Espanol), and it became clear to me quickly that I'd bitten off more than I could linguistically chew.  I spoke no Hebrew or Ladino, and my Greek was conversational at best.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Anticipation Dreams

There are two nights each year through which I'm consistently unable to sleep peacefully: Christmas Eve and the night before the first day of school. 

The night before Christmas morning is a predictable one, right?  Especially for a little kid.  Buzzing with the anticipation of opening my presents the following morning, I'd have four to five dreams before morning finally came.  One year -- maybe when I was in fourth grade? -- each dream set forth a number of quests that needed to be completed before I could open my presents, each task more convoluted and labyrinthine than the last, until finally I would get to my presents, rip open the first one --

and wake up.