And It's A Good Thing

The last Sunday brunch before Christmas was a low-key affair, with not everybody quite showing up, but still a wonderful moment out of my work week where I can interact with humanity in a manner that doesn't require me to bustle about finding Andrea Bocelli CDs for them (and wouldn't you know it -- now that these people's constant gripes holiday prayers have been answered and Josh Groban finally put out a Christmas CD this year, now they're crabbing non-stop about why Bocelli hasn't put one out yet himself -- or even more bizarre, Paul Potts, who just who just won Britain's Got Talent this year and has his first album on the shelves as of just this autumn... I'm surprised these people aren't furious that he already hasn't had a retrospective box set out so far [But I digress!]). It was warm yet rainy, and I arrived nearly 30 minutes early to D'Egg down on Main Street in downtown Norfolk (one of our usual brunch mainstays) so I browsed about Prince Books across the street and spent some money that I probably shouldn't, but needed to since I found a few things that I couldn't get anywhere back at the beach.

Alison Bechdel, famed creator of the syndicated comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For chronicles her life growing up with her late father in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic complete with her expressive black and white art and prose that can be sometimes almost Chekovian in the way it can be both comic and tragic at the same time. Alison's relationship with her aloof, exacting father who died a repressed homosexual (the same year Alison herself came out during her college years) that was popularly considered a suicide is dissected in patterns and diary-like remembrances of the life of a daughter growing up and trying to piece together the enigma that was the most imposing and complex presence throughout her young life.

And at last, The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, another autobiographic-novel from a female perspective, this time of a Tehranian girl coming of age during Islamic revolutionary Iran, from her high school years in Vienna far from her family, to her self-imposed exile from the home she always loved. This book is now a a film, done in Satrapi's same stark noir-ish style art, which recently won the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. I've seen several volumes here and there throughout town, but never the entire series, so I'm massively stoked to be finally getting this.

So anyway, our breakfast friends Mike C. and Donna were spontaneously married a few days ago, and they gifted us with some home-baked Christmas goodies, like white chocolate pretzels, nut-brownie cookies, and roasted marshmallows dipped in chocolate and rolled in peppermint. Needless to say, my tum-tum be hurtin' mighty fierce right now. But it was all good, baby. In fact, times like today I'm reminded to be thankful for having more blessings to count than too few. And it's nice. Very nice, indeed.