Newberry!

I love Newberry medal books like only (future) librarians and teachers can. The books are for kids, supposedly, at least the authors wrote them for kids, and usually, kids do love them. And the kids love them for all the right reasons, because they're good and engaging and usually have wonderful lessons about life that come across by just being very real (and I am sure the kids who read them usually just enjoy them and learn without going "oh hey, that's an important life lesson!") Librarians and teachers tend to be the ones who love them because of the life lessons. Anyway, I'm writing because Neil Gaiman's book The Graveyard Book just won this year's Newberry, and I'm thrilled.

Problem is, I have not yet read this book, because I didn't realize it exists, and now I need to. So, I skipped the library option (sorry libraries) and went straight to Amazon. Once I was there, I had almost decided NOT to buy the book, when I found another book, Everything You Know About God is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, and it looked so fascinating and so potentially challenging (I tend to read pro-religion books, and this, while not anti-religion, looks slightly...subversive) that I needed it. When I looked at the price, I realized that if I bought that book AND the other, I would get free shipping. So I did it. Now that it's done I regret the money spending, but really hope it's worth it. These books are both books I want to read and "library building books" - books that have merit by making my library more interesting and well-rounded and up to date. My gosh, I'm doing collection development for myself!

Also, I just bought a new bookshelf to accommodate my book problem. My boyfriend's response to all this: "Keep it up and I'm going to confiscate your credit card." I would so deserve it.

Mental Shoebox

When you were a kid, did you ever have a shoebox under your bed that you put important things in? Things that probably didn't really matter much to anyone else but for some reason mattered to you, maybe reminded you of something important? Yeah, neither did I. I think that's something that only happens in movies. But, there is a shoebox in my closet in my parent's house that still has a bunch of random mementos from high school - some prom souvenirs, possibly something from marching band, and a whole ton of notes my best friend wrote to me long after it was reasonable for us to be writing notes to each other. By the way, I still love writing notes, and if you ask for one I will write you one, quite possibly in a colored pen and folded into a neat shape.

Anyway, while I don't really have a shoebox full of important things, I do try to keep a mental shoebox - I like to hoard memories of small moments that, often despite (or because of) their unimportance, mean a lot to me. I like to tuck them away in my memory so much later I can take them out and think about how nice that moment was, how I felt, and how it looked. Some recent additions to my mental shoebox:

Christmas morning this year. I absolutely love giving gifts, and I go to great lengths to find the right gift for each person on my list. As it happens I also love receiving gifts, so Christmas is really a great time for me. Now that I don't suffer from Christmas Eve excitement insomnia the morning is far better, when I meander out of bed to sit on the floor by the tree and open presents with my family. This year I think I did a great job at giving gifts, and the moment that especially sticks out to me is me, sitting on the floor holding my new stock pot while my mom tried on her sweater and my dad played with his iPod and my sister unrolled her map. Maybe it's materialistic, that I focused so much on the gifts, but I think the real important thing is that we all know each other so well we knew exactly what we all wanted and needed, and were all there together to share that.

Last Saturday, between the time I woke up next to my boyfriend, who thought I might want to cuddle a little before he left for the airport, and when he dropped me off at my apartment. There, although normally undemonstrative in public, the last thing he did before driving away was remind me through the speaker of his not-actually-a-cop-car that he loves m. Granted, it was 6:30am and we were the only people awake, but it was cute, and overall an unexpectedly good morning for having awakened at 5:30 am.

Walking up the last hill in the cemetery before I turn off into the path behind my apartment building keeps reminding me of every winter I've been in college (and now grad school). In the afternoon when it's sunny the sun dips out of sight for a moment behind the hill, and everything is suddenly silver and shiny and unreal, and also reminds me of my walk home last year. It was also uphill at the end, and ended with an unexpectedly pretty view of the yard before the hall that always made me feel lost in the wrong decade. Something about the two hills in the winter is the same, and makes me oddly nostalgic. Which, I guess, is kind of the point of the mental shoebox.