Maybe I should have made this its own number.

For Christmas, Ken "amazoned" (trying to make that into an acceptable verb and Word of the Year next year like "truthiness") me his life-changing book, "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace. I started it on Monday and I would say I am "plugging" throught the 1000 pages+, but in actuality, I don't feel like "plugging" is accurate. In fact, I am loving this book. I spent over one hour yesterday afternoon lost in a 8 page footnote. I absolutely love looking up roots of words and connecting details in my mind. Maybe I should go for that PhD afterall. Lost in a library for hours once again. Sounds like a dream.

Here is my absolute favorite passage so far... found in a footnote. "The figure of Death presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs."

As the foreword says, this book is "like a spaceship with no recognizable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny, and it has no discernible flaws. If you could somehow smash it into smaller pieces, there would be certainly no way to put it back together again. It simply is."

Thanks for the gift, Ken.