Kindle Notes & Highlights
There are few moments in life as good as the one right before you open a present. When else is anyone so hopeful and naïve? Even after you’ve gotten enough presents in life to know that whatever’s in the box is probably not as great as you want it to be, you never really stop hoping. Or I hope you don’t. The day someone hands me a present and I think meh is the day it’s all over. If life has wrung you so dry you can’t get excited about presents, forget about it.
We didn’t talk about love or death or feelings in my house, and so I learned about them the way I learned about singing: through books and movies and magazines. In some respects, this is terrific, since I learned from the best. But the problem with it is it’s one-directional. There’s no experience, no exchange. It turns you into a vessel, a smooth cylinder with no parts for joining, just a big hole in the center to fill.
Your first pair of parents makes you, and then you go through life choosing different parents, remaking yourself to look like them. Sometimes the person is an actual person, like your annoyingly sporty shrink, and you have the luxury of interacting with her. Sometimes the person isn’t real, is instead the protagonist of a mediocre television series or the prince of Denmark. And sometimes the parent you’ve chosen up and dies, and you’re left with a rabbinical certificate and a job you hate at a photocopy shop in Crown Heights, and then all you’ve got is some random junk, picked up from
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You have to stop living as the person you want to be and start living as the person you are.
