#3 and #4

Today I wrapped up two books. First is I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson. I'm a huge fan of his, having read A Short History of Nearly Everything, Lost Continent, and, one of my all-time favorites, A Walk in the Woods. This one did not disappoint. It's a compilation of the columns he wrote for a British newspaper when he moved back to U.S. (Hanover, New Hampshire) after having spent the past 20 years in Britain. Here's my favorite passage. He's describing his attempts to find a winter pastime in New Hampshire, and here he's taking his daughter ice-skating:

And I do know how to skate, honestly. It's just that my legs, after years of inactivity, got a little overecited to be confronted with so much slipperiness. As soon as I stepped onto the ice, they decided they wanted to visit every corner of the pond at once, from lots of different directions. They went this way and that, scissoring and splaying, sometimes getting as much as twelve feet apart, but constantly gathering momentum, until at last they flew out from udner me and I landed on my butt with such a wallop that my coccyx hit the roof of my mouth and i had to push my esophagus back in with my fingers.

"Wow!" said my startled butt as I clambered heavily back to my feet. "That ice is hard."

"Hey, let ME see," cried by head and instantly down I went again.

And so it went for the next thirty minutes, with various extremities of my body -- shoulders, chin, nose, one or two of the more adventurous internal organs -- hurling themselves at the ice in a spirit of investigation. From a distance I suppose I must have looked like someone being worked over by an invisible gladiator."

Admittedly, this strikes a cord given our recent recreational activities. Great, quick read.

I've also just finished How to Practice; the Way to a Meaningful Life, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Interestingly enough, this one wasn't quite as entertaining as #3. I was interested in learning a little more about Buddhism, so when I came across this on an endcap at a Target, I figured, "what the hell" (because, of course, all life-changing spiritual awakenings are prompted by purchases off an endcap at a major discount department store). I figure there are two kinds of people who would read this book, a) those people who wanted to read something by the Dalai Lama, to learn more about Buddhism, b) those people who were interested in putting themselves on the path toward enlightenment. Now, not everyone may know which category they fall into when they open the book. I was keeping an open-mind. I mean, I have been to that one Buddhist meditation retreat (it was three hours long, and I spent the final two hours and 45 minutes thinking about how incredibly uncomfortable I was having to sit criss-cross-applesauce), AND Buddhism seemed to do a lot for Tina Turner (at least according to Angela Basset's performance in What's Love Got to Do With It). So I was thinking, at least superficially, maybe I should get on board.

Well now, having finished the book, I can safely say that I am the "learning more about Buddhism" type. I'm not sure that the path to enlightenment is easily navigable for a stay-at-home mom in suburbia. Not that I didn't get what His Holiness was saying (ok, well, I didn't get all of it), but it's just that that shit seemed really hard. For what it's worth though, the tenets of Buddhism seem to come down to one thing: help others, and if that's not possible, do no harm. That's something I can aspire to.