Post-Christmascookie hungover

I've eaten enough chocolate in the past week to kill a dog. This contributed, in part, to the merry Christmas I had yesterday. I spent it at home with Mom, saying goodbye to the puppy we were watching for Adam Devitt and then opening gifts for most of the morning. The lab was also chocolate --- a gift for Adam's dad that stayed with Mom and me so she'd be a surprise --- and eventually got named Abby even though she looked like, to me, a Cecelia. She slept with me Christmas Eve Eve and was a perfectly well-behaved live teddybear.

Christmas Eve we went to Aunt Mary and Uncle Dale's for wonderful cookies, cheese and crackers, bread dip, and a game of Risk. It was good to see the cousins, as usual. They're closer to siblings than anything I've ever had, and it's been fun to watch them grow up/change hairstyles/get jobs/fall in love/fall out of it/ pick careers/ pick new ones. I'm the oldest, which means I'll be annoyed when they each get married before I do, one by one.

I have a lot of calls to make today. There are a few people I still really want to see while I'm home, and I have a sh*tload of work to do on my Master's Project. If I set up some interviews today with reps from major record labels for the week I get back to New York City, I'll sleep easier. This does not necessarily mean I'll do it.

I read David Sedaris' Holidays on Ice to get me into the Christmas spirit, and am now snowplowing through The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. The latter is beautiful but the former is laugh-like-you-know-you-shouldn't-because-it's-so-offensive funny. Here's one of my favorite parts, from a story called "Santaland Diaries" that features David Sedaris getting a job as an elf at Macy's:

We were standing near the Lollipop Forest when we realized that Santa is an anagram of Satan. Father Christmas or the Devil --- so close but yet so far. We imagined a SatanLand where visitors would wade through steaming pools of human blood and feces before arriving at the Gates of Hell, where a hideous imp in a singed velvet costume would take them by the hand and lead them toward Satan. Once we thought of it we couldn't get it out of our minds. Overhearing the customers we would substitute the word Satan for the word Santa.

"What do you think, Michael? Do you think Macy's has the real Satan?"

I got two books of essays by Joseph Brodsky and Gideon's Trumpet by Anthony Lewis (one of my law class profs) for Christmas. I also got some hot jewelry, a teal travel coffeemug, a Diana Krall CD and a Palm Pilot identical to the one that got stolen a few weeks back.

And some more chocolate. I thought the other day that I should go to some sort of camp, where I am sequestered and forced to eat only chocolate for two weeks, to drink only melted chocolate in to-the-brim-filled plastic cups through a straw. I think this would sufficiently cure me of my chocoholism.