Life is Beautiful

Oh joy - I adoooooore the holiday season! I love the twinkling lights on all the trees and storefronts, I love the outdoor ice skating rinks (one popped up in Union Square this year), I love the holiday display in Macy's windows, I love the jolliness in the air, I love the crisp weather, I love planning Christmas presents, I love all the holiday get-togethers, I love the anticipation of ski season, I love the anticipation of ringing in the new year with loved ones...I love it all. The holiday season makes me so happy! The holiday sales make me so broke!

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Slumdog Millionaire is the best movie I've seen in a really long time. It was as raw and gritty as City of God, painted a very real and human picture of life in the slums of Mumbai and was overall really really touching.

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We had a family Thanksgiving this year, the first one with my dad, grandmother, brother and me in a very very long time. My dad and grandmother insisted that we spend Thanksgiving together this year since for a long time I spent pretty much all the holidays with P's family. Spending too much time in a confined space/period with my family makes me go just a teeny bit stir crazy, but overall, I'm really glad we did it. My dad's health issues and seeing my grandmother get increasingly older and frailer makes me realize that our time together is so short, and so precious. I don't ever want to look back and regret not spending enough time with my family or loved ones. It's funny how the days are long, but the years are so short. I think when you are young(er) time feels endless. As a child, adults seemed old, but their mortality (or my own for that matter) never really occurred to me in any real sense. These days, the brevity of our days together - or perhaps the brevity of the quality time we have left together (when everyone is of good health and sound mind) is all too real.

Thinking about the brevity of life also makes me re-evaluate my priorities. Life is really too short to waste any hours or minutes being unhappy or dwelling on the negative. I know it's impossible to be overflowing with happiness every second of your life...but then, is it really impossible? I don't know, I kind of feel like it IS possible. Seeing my grandmother so frail these days makes me really sad and teary, but I also feel so happy and grateful to the powers that be that I got to be her granddaughter. Being stuck in traffic with my dad, who I obviously inherited my impatient gene from, makes me antsy and anxious, yet I'm happy knowing that those small moments you share, the seemingly ordinary conversations and encounters you have with each other, are the things that remain. And as my grandmother pointed out, my life would be so dull without my little brother annoying me all the time. Family is where I am completely safe, unconditionally loved and perpetually annoyed. Friends are where I am inspired, uplifted, unconditionally accepted and perpetually laughing.

I spent most of my first 20 or so years longing for the past or working towards my future. I don't think I ever really fully appreciated the here and now during those years, mostly because many of those years were really hard and painful for my family. But ever since law school, and especially in the last few years, the "now" has been so amazing. People often say that college was the best time of their life, but the best time of my life in my opinion is NOW. And I feel so fortunate that I have absolutely felt that way for the last 8 or 9 years, even through the tumultuous periods. As I often find myself saying to friends: life just seems to get better as we get older. If only the elasticity of our skin and our metabolisms kept getting better as well.