My parents had some friends over for dinner the other night — an eccentric philosopher and his sharp-eyed (sharp-tongued?) wife. At some point in the evening the woman stood up and examined the books on the shelf in the living room.

“Someone in this house has a little existential angst.”

There, on the tight canvas of the edge of a Chinese-English dictionary that I’m sure has not been touched in approximately eight years, appeared the gloomy assertion “Life sucks.”

These are gorgeous and weird. My favourite is the one you see when you first click on “Gallery” — this wonderful dragon claw-tapioca pearl-crepe paper thing. I don’t even know what it is. Do you?

– Does it scare me that yesterday morning I spent a solid 20 minutes wandering in circles around the 4th floor of my new office building, walking past the same plants and the same people’s backs six or seven times, the panic slowly rising in my belly, until I finally realised that, in fact, I work on the 3rd floor of the building? Yes, yes it does. For many and many reasons.

These reasons did not, however, prevent me from pushing “4″ in the lift again today.

– Clean, smooth ice is one of the prettiest things in the world, I think. I broke off a small icicle from the bottom of a large truck the other day and fondled it quite lasciviously while walking home.

– Clean, smooth ice under one’s feet is treacherous when a person is as clutzy as I am. So far the score is Ice: 4, Meera: 0.

– For your pleasure, because I am dry of words, and because Ross and I were talking about his childhood obsession with collecting insects, here is a wonderful Japanese postcard for you to look at. (Picture taken this summer, at the MFA)

My camera battery just died, so I can’t post a picture, but things out there are still blizzarding and show no signs of abating. The winds are so strong (and erratic) that there are strange drifts and peaks of snow that are several feet high in some places, but also a few tiny spots of ground that are barely covered. Mostly it looks like we’ve had about a couple of feet at least so far, and it might continue snowing until 6pm this evening. Erdos is slowly getting buried. We are hunkered down with Tamari almonds and chocolate, gazing out the windows mesmerised.

We just saw a tiny little sparrow flitting about in the backyard and I marvelled at its resilence. I wonder how many animals die during snowstorms like this one. There is a stray cat we sometimes see behind the apartment — where is it now? Where would it go for shelter? And then there are the human animals. The city has emergency procedures to try to get as many homeless people indoors as possible during snowstorms, but it is difficult to imagine that they manage to help everyone… I’ve never felt more blessed by my warm house.

You can’t really tell from this shot of the view from my living room window how VERY cool this snowstorm is. The wind is whippin about like crazy, and they say we might get up to 30 inches of snow. I’ll believe that when I see it… but I will say I am glad I stocked up on an emergency supply of good chocolate today.

Let me try to explain how I found myself, several minutes past one pee em this afternoon, standing under the neon lights of the Cambridgeside Galleria, surrounded by suits on their lunch breaks and moms pushing babies, trying not to blubber like a fool in front of the kind people offering free flu shots to patrons of the mall. (Hush, dear reader — I was not weeping for the usual dreary litany of grey miseries that have lived in my chest of late. These were very good tears, as you shall see.)

I was waiting to meet Jo, who wanted to buy a new pair of jeans. This explains my location.

Because of MBTA construction, Jo was late for our 1 o’clock meeting. I am, of course, saddened by any loss of Jo-time, but this does not explain the sobs tickling the back of my throat.

No — I was crying for a different reason, a delicious reason, a reason that dissolved nearly two decades of time into the blurry zig-zags of movie flashbacks and brought me right back to the little girl I used to be. I was crying, beloveds, because of a book.

Firmly plugged into my portable isolation booth, I was listening to the last few minutes of Graeme Malcolm narrating — quite wonderfully — Kate DiCamillo’s Newbury Award winning book The Tale of Despereax. This is not going to be a book review entry, except that I do want to tell you what a tremendous job I think Kate DiCamillo accomplished in writing an extremely charming animal fable/fairytale that has a highly avuncular (or auntly, if you will) narrative voice,* but never (in my opinion) descends into cutesyness or irritating didacticism. The story (which is about a tiny mouse who would be a knight in shining armor, a rat who would escape the shadows and enter the light, and a serving girl who would become a princess) is occasionally breathtakingly lovely in its exploration of hope, identity, and the power of story. It is also peopled with creatures named Botticelli, Chiaroscuro, and Miggery Sow, which are all words that are just really fun to say.

If you’re interested, I’d be happy to make you a copy of my audiobook version of it (I am sure that at least 50% of my enjoyment came from the extraordinarily rich narration of Graeme Malcolm, who does about six different accents and made every character visible to this very non-visual reader). You might love it as much as I do, or you might find its style grates on your last nerve. It doesn’t really matter; what I am trying to tell you is that I got to the end, and hearts were being broken and mended all over the place, and the damned book made me cry!

It has been far too long a time since anything other than my own sorry self has moved me to anything other than the most selfish of tears, and I was forcefully reminded of how I used to sob over books constantly when I was a wee thing — and of why, at the very bottom of the thing, I love reading so very much.

It was, to put it quite simply, wonderful.

What was the last book you wept over?

*The kind of narrator who does annoying things like call you “dear reader.”

Ok, I have just moved from one room to another and closed three doors (there are, by the way, nine doorways in my apartment, not including closets — I keep counting them in the hope that one day, like Coraline, I will find one that leads nowhere) so that I could get away from the sound of the television on which Ross is watching The Daily Show. I feel bad, because I’d already asked him to turn down the volume (which was not even loud to begin with), but I felt like I was going mad trying to write with the low hum of TV voices murmuring next door. I am a little scared by the amount of quiet my brain appears to need in order to function at even the most rudimentary of levels these days. I am not sure when it happened, but I have concluded that at some point over the past couple of months someone must have replaced my mind with a few fistfuls of cotton wool.

But cotton wool or no, there are things of which you must be told!

Item the first: Yesterevening, after Jo and I wept and giggled through a full packet of tissues together, I determined that we had to do something awfully cool in order to rescue the day. We started by going to Bartley’s, where I ate Bill Clinton and Jo ate the New England Patriots.

(Yes, we were very full afterwards.)

We proceeded to meet Ross at the Brattle, where we saw a film that immediately entered my list of top ten movies of all time. Jo and I had both read Donkey Skin, a French fairytale by Charles Perrault, in our Fairytale class at Simmons lo these many years ago. Little did we know that not only is Donkey Skin a bizarre story of forbidden love, fantastic fashion, and animals that poop jewels, but it is also a ridiculously sublime musical extravaganza complete with kooky costumes, horses that are dyed blue and red to match the blue and red kingdoms the story is set in, and a cast of characters who spend most of the movie in a state of absurd, earnest idiocy. My favourite part (I think this might be everyone’s favourite part) is when the ghostly souls of the two young lovers detach from their bodies, meet in the forest, float about on a boat, and sing a song of joy. The song is about how extreme their happiness will be when they are together, and how they will find ways to express it. Choice lyrics include:

“We will go together to the snack bar/
We will smoke a pipe in secret/
And then we will eat all the cake!”

In French, these lyrics somehow manage to rhyme, which makes them even better.

Item the second: Jo and I went to a community choir practice tonight! I haven’t sung in a choir since I was 13 years old and in a crazy children’s opera called “Help! Help! The Globolinks!” (which is another story for another day), so this was a little bit scary. However, on the whole I think it was a good move on our parts, for the following reasons:

1) We now know the Alto section of a peppy little ditty by Bach called “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leeeeeeeeben.” And really, how many people can honestly say that?

2) We weren’t the only people there under the age of 50! Yay!

3) The pianist was named “Flossie,” and she looked like one. This made me more happy than I can really explain.

4) Although we had to wear nametags, no one made us stand up and introduce ourselves — phew! On the other hand, it is important for me to remind myself that saying hello to new people does not have to include a detailed exposition of my neuroses. Jo and I were comparing notes afterwards over Dunkin’ and Donuts and were forced to admit that she is not, in fact, obliged to answer the innocent question, “So, what do you do?” by turning beet red, shuffling her feet and mumbling “Um. Well, I don’t actually have a career…”. And I am not, in fact, obliged to burst into tears and confess “I just quit my job, because I’m a quitting quitter! Thanks for asking!”

You will be glad to know that while we do go through rather a lot of tissues, we also try to laugh at ourselves as much as we can. I think we are getting better at it, too.

I will leave you with some images from Peau d’Ane:

“I must run away from my father who wants to marry me! But will my dress fit in the boat?”

“Damn, I’m fine.”

“Children do not marry their parents!”

“Help! I seem to be being eaten by a donkey! Yet I must continue to bound lightly through the air!”