Lest we forget.

Tragedy struck in Newtown, CT today, and amid all the professions of shock and sympathy, everyone's prayers for those left behind and their pledges to hug their loved ones tighter than ever today, I've noticed a disturbing trend in thought: "This is a time for grieving. Save your opinions for another day. This is not the time." These people are sincere in their intentions, and I understand their desire to shelter those left behind in this fragile aftermath, but with all due respect, there is no better time than right now to have this conversation.

I don't mean to be callous. Like everyone else, my prayers and my heart go out to those whose lives have been forever altered by the actions of one unhinged gunman, and I agree that even such symbolic gestures as flying the flag at half-mast in honor of the dead are the least we can do in memory of those lost, and for the sake of those left behind. But I worry about our priorities here, because these are words and actions occurring after the fact, and no comforting embrace will ever repair the damage that was done today. For 27 people, their families, and their friends, it will always be too late. The President's speech, your Facebook status, grief counseling: these may well be effective as palliative care, but what we need is preventative action.

With regards to when is and is not the "right" time: Are there guidelines for the length of this grace period we afford conversations on how to prevent future tragedies? Is there a convenient time when we can openly communicate about practical, necessary ways to protect the people we love from what's become a recurring threat to their safety and peace of mind? Because Columbine happened, Virginia Tech happened, and Aurora happened, and it was too painful to talk about then. Newtown happened, and it's too painful to talk about it now. Do you know what sounds painful? Being shot in an elementary school classroom.

I'm asking genuinely: when will we, as a nation, be able to talk about this? However much this kind of talk hurts now, it will never get easier. Over two dozen people died today; I can't help but think that the best possible way to respect their memory is not to waste a single moment in initiating discussion about what we need to do so that this never happens again. Grieving for the past and planning for the future need not be mutually exclusive; in fact, it's exactly that false distinction that perpetuates this pattern of shootings. If this happens again tomorrow, will we once again hold off on addressing it until the day after? Friends and family will continue to mourn, but so too will weapons continue to enter into the hands of those unqualified to wield them.

No, today isn't the day to sit down and debate gun control. That was on yesterday's agenda, but we seem to have missed that meeting, and we've suffered the consequences.

A single mass shooting should make you sad. Two dozen in the past six years should make you angry, and that anger should make you want to act: not by offering consolatory pats on the back to wounded victims or tissues to bereaved parents, but by taking decisive measures to to ensure that no further blood nor tears will fall.

We claim, with apparent sincerity, that we will never forget the victims of today. Past history says we're lying to ourselves. With each day that passes, our outrage fades quietly into the background of the latest updates about Kate Middleton's pregnancy and the next episode of American Horror Story, the next semester or the new financial quarter, the daily challenges of raising a child or the endless back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate. Every day we continue to heal, but with that healing comes an amnesia that is both soothing and perilous, as the conversation that is "too soon" may once again be too late.

This day has been filled with suffering, and I don't mean to pour salt in the wound. All I ask is that we blink through our tears and find a way, once and for all, to ensure that this tragedy will be the last of its kind.

Adventures in Costco, and What I Found There.

Inspired by the single most delightful article I read this week, which features photos of Joe Biden at Costco buying pie and children's books, I thought I'd share my own most recent Costco adventure.

Full disclosure: the events depicted below did take place on Black Friday, but I'd like to defend the apparent contradiction of how I am theoretically opposed to, yet participated in the excesses of the most appalling consumerist free-for-all in American history (at least until the day after next Thanksgiving, which will be the worst until the year after, and so on for the foreseeable future).
1. I'm a college student, and only being home for four full days on break limits the times when I can make purchases I intended to make anyway, implausibly high percentage-off discounts or not.
2. I put my foot down on shopping on the Thursday night of Thanksgiving itself. Workers being forced away from personal celebration on a national holiday of gratitude so they can work mandatory shifts for faceless corporations threatening termination from their sub-living wage employment makes me angrier and wordier than any other recent incarnation of capitalist greed. I'm looking at you, Walmart, and I'm giving you the evil eye.
3. I shopped at a leisurely pace at a normal-people hour, like when there was daylight shining and everything. I returned anything I picked up and didn't buy to its proper shelf/bin/rack/table. I tried to be polite.
4. COSTCO, YOU GUYS. Costco always, Costco forever. (Have you seen the "Good Guy Costco CEO" meme yet? If not, check it out.)

Anyway, I love Costco and you should too and here's why:

 Yes, that is a plush dog larger than my nineteen-year-old brother's entire upper body. Yes, I want it. Christmas is coming up, friends...

 On the flip side of stuffed animals, here is a less-than-life-size pony that is still large enough for most children to comfortably sit astride in their sunshine-yellow playroom with their model train sets, oversize custom-built dollhouse, and handcrafted wooden block sets imported from Switzerland. I didn't check the price tag, but I assume it was extravagant, even for Costco.

 When I said these ponies were large enough for most children, I meant my feet don't touch the ground. :(

 The hero Costco deserves, but not the one it needs right now.

 More oversized plush. More things I want.

 All seven Harry Potter books in pristine, uncracked-spine, unwrinkled-pages, as-yet-unloved condition could be yours for only $47.99. I have them all, but...they don't come all matchy-matchy in a gift box like this.

 This is TOO MANY VEGGIE STRAWS, people. By that, I mean buy these and invite me over to hang out and I'll help you eat them.

  Is that chip illustration to scale? Because, if so...awesome/terrifying. (It's not.)

Costco, purveyor of fine stuffed toys that will suffocate your child if they become trapped beneath them without a well-muscled adult chaperone to save them. Maybe that's what Batman's for?

There were 24 cookies in that container. Four days later, there were 0.

A happy surprise.

Hello, blog. It's 1:20 a.m. on a Friday night/Saturday morning, and I'm sprawled across the bed still fully dressed with a book, my laptop, and a full tub of cheese balls that I won in a guess-how-many-cheese-balls-are-in-the-tub contest (it was for charity, okay?). It feels like a good time to come back to you.

Over the past few years of my undergrad education, I've become more accustomed to telling people that I'm an English major and expecting that knowledge to immediately help them fill in some details about me, my educational goals an easy heuristic for my other skills and interests. Yes, I'm a words person, and if you know what I mean by that, so are you: I read (novels and the New York Times, food blogs and style blogs, political analysis, poetry that doesn't always rhyme, and tweets upon tweets) and I write (mostly papers, sometimes blogs, occasional opinion articles, and tweets upon tweets) and I give a fuck about Oxford commas (maybe too much). My freshman year, I brought a dozen books to school with me, and came home with over seventy, and a sore back from carrying them down the stairs in my residence hall. I find it appalling that in a fire, paperbacks would be the first casualties. I also wear glasses that make me look like a junior librarian, because surprise: reading under the covers with a flashlight as a child tends to make you nearsighted.

Unsurprisingly, I'm also a library person. I remember, in those halcyon childhood days of near-endless time to read, amassing piles of Babysitter's Club books from my town library's used book sales in the dusty, airless basement. When Sweet Valley High and the Boxcar Children ceased to satisfy me, I went upstairs and checked out stacks of Nancy Drew books and anything by Paula Danziger from the Young Adult shelf (unfortunately, singular) before exhausting the supply and moving on to J. D. Salinger and Oscar Wilde, all the while totally disinterested in the dog-eared copies of mass-market romance and sci-fi novels that comprised the remainder of the basement book room. It took about ten years and an electrical explosion to get me back down there, but it was ultimately worth the time in between.

I got a job when I was 15, scooping Italian ice for the odd customer or two who wandered in almost by accident during my four-hour shifts, and predictably exhausted my meager paychecks on book binges. Barnes & Noble's bargain book bin sales were cause for excited emails (hellooo, early 2000s) with my best friend about exactly which titles sounded promising, and my bank account and the U.S. Postal Service both rue the day I realized how cheap and easy it was to buy used books on Amazon. Still, I spent more than I care to admit on clean, fresh paperbacks in those days, savoring the experience of making an untouched novel really and truly mine, slightly (only ever slightly!) bent cover and all. I remember where my books came from better than I remember where I buy my clothes, and for good reason: they were bankrupting me.

In May 2010, the Morristown & Morris Township Library blew up -- literally. Some sort of major electrical mishap underneath the foundation of the building caused approximately $1 million worth of structural damage, and the library was forced to temporarily move its operations elsewhere. The weekly book sale, which I'd entirely forgotten about in the decade of my maturation from children's literature to existentialist philosophers, relocated to an unoccupied corner storefront a full half-block closer to my house. I can't remember whether I or my best friend was the first to (re)discover its ill-advertised magnificence, but during that summer immediately following, we both certainly did our part to keep the library's restoration efforts afloat. A far cry from the stifling, asthma-inducing conditions of the library basement, the new space was small enough to feel intimate, but airy enough to let books and their potential buyers breathe. For prices ranging from $0.25 to $2, I bought copies of books I'd read but didn't own, and books I'd judged by their covers and with which I only later read and loved: Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty trilogy, Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Stephen Dubner & Stephen D. Levitt's Freakonomics. In the past two years alone, my personal collection has probably grown by half, thanks to the people crazy enough to donate perfectly intact copies of great books to the sale.

 Now that I've filled out most of my collection, I have a tendency to stock up on contemporary literary fiction in near-mint condition whenever I make a book sale pilgrimage, always thinking I'll get around to reading whatever hot new thing is all over the New York Times bestseller lists and be the hit of all the dinner parties (note: this is not really a thing. I don't know anyone who throws dinner parties, and I don't know that I have the manners to attend them anyway). Most recently, I optimistically acquired copies of Nicole Krauss's  Great House, Jennifer DuBois's A Partial History of Lost Causes, and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, the last of which was recently shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Of course, I've had less than sufficient time to actually crack any of their spines since classes started, but after an academically exhausting few weeks, I thought I needed to get back in touch with what I love about reading. I'm glad I started with The Art of Fielding tonight, not only because it only took me a single chapter to fall in love, but because I found this upon turning the first page:

It was like getting an unexpected letter from a friend in the mail, or two candy bars from a vending machine when you've only paid for one, or whatever the opposite of rain on your wedding day is: totally great. So thanks, Morristown Library; I've always been a fan of you.

The Books I Read: 2011

Presented without excess commentary, explanations, or embarrassment, these are all the books I read in their entirety, a few for class but mostly by choice, from this past January through December. There is, of course, significant overlap with my Summer Reading 2011 post, but it made more sense to be redundant and comprehensive than to skip over those books in this list.

How to Make an American Quilt -- Whitney Otto
Rites of Spring (Break) -- Diana Peterfreund
Sense and Sensibility -- Jane Austen
The Virgin Suicides -- Jeffrey Eugenides
Beauty and the Beast -- Jeanne-Marie le Prince de Beaumont
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -- Dave Eggers
Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam -- David R. Farber
Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded -- Samuel Richardson
Shamela -- Henry Fielding
Colossus: The Rise and the Fall of the American Empire -- Niall Ferguson
What Now? -- Ann Patchett
How Did You Get This Number -- Sloane Crosley
Nine Stories -- J. D. Salinger
Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- Marisha Pessl
On Chesil Beach -- Ian McEwan
The Russian Debutante's Handbook -- Gary Shteyngart
The Phantom Tollbooth -- Norton Juster
A Widow for One Year -- John Irving
Someone I Loved -- Anna Gavalda
I Am Charlotte Simmons -- Tom Wolfe
Indecision -- Benjamin Kunkel
The Luneberg Variation -- Paolo Maurensig
Selected Stories -- E. M. Forster
Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel García Márquez
The Forgotten Garden -- Kate Morton
The School of Essential Ingredients -- Erica Bauermeister
Old School -- Tobias Wolff
The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation -- Elizabeth Berg
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance -- Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Still Alice -- Lisa Genova
The Elegance of the Hedgehog -- Muriel Barbery
Picnic, Lightning -- Billy Collins
Interpreter of Maladies -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The Music Lesson -- Katharine Weber
One Day -- David Nicholls
Little Bee -- Chris Cleave
The Classmates: Chaos, Privilege, and the End of an Era -- Geoffrey Douglas
A Moveable Feast -- Ernest Hemingway
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- Lynne Truss
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris -- John Baxter
The Hunger Games -- Suzanne Collins
Never Let Me Go -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Everything Beautiful Began After -- Simon van Booy
Nocturnes -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Middlesex -- Jeffrey Eugenides
Catching Fire -- Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay -- Suzanne Collins
Anna in the Tropics -- Nilo Cruz
The Handmaid and the Carpenter -- Elizabeth Berg
Spring Awakening -- Steven Sater
The Anthologist -- Nicholson Baker

If authors were stocks, I'd say I made some pretty strong investments this year.

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