Side note: I think I'm going to name my first little dog лапушка. Lapushka. Little Paw. Isn't Russian just adorable sometimes?
This week was so wonderful, at least in the beginning. I went outside all of the time so I couldn't hear Facebook's siren call, and I adventured. I read books, which I'll tell you about later, I wrote things, I watched Anna Karenina. I returned all of my library books and checked out six new ones. I wrote letters, picked flowers, got hit on by ten year olds, which is a true story. I can still hear their pre-pubescent voices from down the street. "Hey, what's your name? He likes you! He wants to kiss you!" the kid on the bike is shouting, ratting out his friend on the bike next to him. They had Southern accents and it was really funny.
It was hard, not going on Facebook. I'm not going to pretend like it wasn't. It seems ridiculous, having an addiction to a social networking site, especially since I'm not one of those avid Farmvillers and I don't have eleventy-billion friends to stalk. Clicking on the Facebook link in my favorites bar has become compulsive, though, and it kind of scares me how often I go to the internet when I so much as pause in my homework.
cont'd...
I really need to get out more.
Oh! I was going to tell you about the book I read during my hiatus. It was a short one, one you've probably all heard of, actually. Night by Elie Wiesel. It was short, yet it felt unmercifully long when I read it. Any longer and it would have ground my insides up. I couldn't take it at parts. I had to look away and take a breath, because it felt like Elie Wiesel had just punched me in the lungs. Hard.
If you haven't read Elie Wiesel's autobiographical tale about the Holocaust yet, then I think I need to warn you. It's graphic. He spares no infant, no crippled old man, no detail. You smell the crematoriums in Birkenau, see the corpses at Auschwitz, freeze and starve in Buna. This is not for the weak at heart.
Wiesel documented human suffering in a way that is unforgettable. The span of just a few years in his life took me through more heartbreak and breaking points than I could even comprehend. I tried to place myself in Elie's position but couldn't. I am so lucky to have been born when and where I was, safe, at least for the moment, from the torment of being treated with even a fraction of the inhumanity of the Nazis towards the concentration camp victims.
Just over one hundred pages, yet it felt like one hundred too many by the time I had finished.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make this so serious. Night was a little blip in my week, but one that I felt needed to be talked about.
I have other books that I'm excited to read. Night was actually something that I had brought from home, but like I told you earlier I checked out six new books from the library. A few are poets for my Creative Writing class (Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney), and I've been chipping away at Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee whenever I can find the time.
I hope to get to The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I've also got The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, which I will admit I picked mostly because of the color of the cover. Beside the lovely turquoise cover, I've had Murdoch recommended to me, so I hope that she'll be interesting. Last of all, I have my anthology, Legends & Lore of the American Indians, which I will pick up whenever I'm in need of something short and sweet. I have a soft spot in my heart for the Native Americans, don't ask me why, and their lore is some of the most fascinating stuff I have ever studied. I love reading about it.
I've been talking too much. It's past one and I haven't even started my paper yet, whoops. Probably best to get going on that. Hope that I didn't frighten you with talk of Night too much!
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