People surprise you, don’t they? I’ll say it a thousand times, how well do we know anyone, really, we don’t know them at all, and yet I find myself wondering how it is that people could be so different from how I’d imagined. Total strangers. Well, sometimes. Other times they’re so predictable it’s like they’re following a script that I’ve written.

I wish I could say it better.

Someday I’ll give you a short story.

The Wood Rat says, on this, the last day of the year:
You can expect to make a thrilling sentimental encounter. You’ll benefit from good astral protection in the administrative and judicial fields. Filled with self-confidence and conscious of your charm, you’ll feel quite at ease on every front. You’ll know what you’ve to do, so don’t let anyone or anything divert you from your way.

Well, it’s almost over, yet another day, yet another year, and appropriately, the last one has come through the revolving door, the last ring around the carousel.

“It’s as if one thinks, I have never been so happy, and then, with a chill, I will never be this happy again.”

I know it’s hard, but we’ll make it better each day. Or at the least, we’ll try.

Check this out…. Had some discourse with my dad today about North Korea and how that half of the peninsula compares with the southern half.

Words I had to look up:
간략 (brief), 제재 (sanction), 인적 자원 (manpower), 차관 (loan) , 앞다투어(scramble for, strive to be first)

Here’s how he signed it:

빠이 , 아 빠가
(Byee, Dad)

Cute, right?

고민 고민 하지마, grrl

All of Queens is inside my belly.

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but I think I finally got rid of what was left of Mexico City.

When I was in one of the rooms of the Museo Nacional de Antropología (aka where the raining starship is in decay) with Memo talking about ancient ball games that involved sacrifice, and then talking about holes in skulls and random organ extraction, I was saying how it’d be nice if someone could just take my heart out. It’d be refreshing to just rip it right out, don’t you think? Memo said I wouldn’t like the side effects, but I don’t know if that’s true.

The other night in one of my dreams a chicken dropped dead on the dinner table. It started out as a live chicken, and then after it dropped dead it morphed into one of those rubber chickens? Is that what happens?

a bengal tiger lunch box, air mail envelopes, memorandum notebooks, basketball-playing pandas, a tittymon, a subscription to the best magazine on earth, a monkey in a totoro suit, hello kitty stamps that sing “you are my sunshine,” bach, the minpins…an unexpected bounty.

Just read this on PopSeoul: “Unlike the west, Christmas in Korea is a time to hang out with friends rather than family.” In which the dinosaur becomes more Korean each and every day.

So I’m not Jewish, but Christmas for me has always been sort of like Chinese food and a movie. When I was growing up it was Korean food and a movie, and this year it was Thai food and a movie: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

It’s all about life and love and mortality and, you know, the journey, and I got to thinking about the way we think we’re supposed to be spending our time and how much we’re supposed to do with each moment. And also how Brad Pitt is spectacularly handsome. And how there’s something beautiful in longing for someone, that the not having is important for the possibility of someday maybe having.

Sean Astin, starring in the new Blagojevich biopic.
If all else fails, I can be a casting director!

(1) Munchies Flaming Hot
(2) Chester’s Fries Flaming Hot
(3) Cheetos Flaming Hot Puffs
(4) Sabritones Flaming Hot
(5) Cheetos Flaming Hot Limón

Special treasure hunting for Flaming Hots ends in secret cove on Knoll Lake at 99¢ Store. Argh!

You were right, it was a sign.

50 across
7 letters
Clue: Dear to the heart
Answer to the puzzle: b-e-l-o-v-e-d

The first time I’ve been up on a lifeguard tower
The first time I can remember seeing a shooting star
The first time I’ve felt so grateful for a hand

Made me wish I could stay

The cemetery at Rose Hills is vast, and now that it’s Christmas the rows of gravestones are dotted with poinsettias and garlands and fake trees. I’ve gone to see my grandmother’s grave twice since I’ve been back, today being the sadder of the two trips.

To get to her plot, you turn into a place that’s called Dignity Memorial, which feels especially appropriate given that, today, I find that there must be more dignity in death than in life, which is saturated with small humiliations.

The first thing I feel compelled to do is wipe off her gravestone. Do we pay our respects to the dead for them or for us?

“You look a little sad,” my niece said. Five years old and she can sense these things.

“Halmoni, please pray lots for her,” my dad said, looking straight at me.

I looked down at the dates, July 24th, 1916 to July 25th, 2008. A 92-year-old life. She was separated from her husband by war, lost a daughter to disease, then had to raise five children on her own, much of it in poverty. Still, she managed, and even tended to a cactus garden with such tenderness that you might never have known that she’d suffered at all.

This kind of love you’ll only find once in a lifetime.

Listen, when all of this around us’ll fall over
I’ll tell you what we’re going to do