I promised Jen I'd write a new entry before I went to sleep tonight, so I guess I'd better do so. Goodness knows, I have enough things to write about... it's just that I'm never quite in the mood to write about them by the time I sit down in front of the computer.

Topics I've been meaning to get to include the rest of the Pygmalion essay story; my speech evaluation; my recent influx of CDs; my newest dictionaries; the search for a boombox; and, unquestionably, many other topics I'm forgetting offhand. But I'm not really up to doing any of them justice at the moment. Instead, I shall ramble about a subject of no consequence at all: pre-shelled pistachios.

On returning to the family home for Shabbos, I encountered pre-shelled pistachios for the first time. It seems wrong. I mean, I love pistachios, but having them already shelled makes eating them way too easy. It makes it possible to eat more than one pistachio at a time, when one ought to be savoring them.

Plus, you lose the ritual; using half the shell from one to pry open the next, and so on. Not to mention that you can't lick the salt off the shells when the shells aren't provided. I dunno; it just seems like too much of the pistachio experience is lost.

This didn't stop me from bringing some back to my apartment anyway. I'll take free pistachios however I can get them.

See, there was this nut shop in Jerusalem, where you could get hot nuts and stuff. Including peanuts.

The thing was, while the peanuts had a mixture of salt and spices on them, they left the papery inner shell on them. So you were faced with a choice: discard the inner shell and lose the salt 'n' spices, or eat 'em with the inner shell. I opted for the latter.

The problem is that once you acquire a taste for eating peanuts with the shell, they seem too bland without it. But without whatever the heck it is they put on them, I'm not much interested in eating peanuts with the shells still on... so I've pretty much been off peanuts since returning to America.

It's always important to have an adequate supply of peanut butter with you. That, and sufficient reading material, which is a mistake I made when going back to the mishpacha this past Shabbos, bringing only one book, a magazine that I'd already read most of, and that day's newspaper, all of which I finished long before I left. That's what I get for filling my backpack with clothes instead of books. I mean, really, where were my priorities?

The problem when it comes to longer trips is that there's no way of bringing adequate reading material with you. So when I went to Israel for the second time (in the 1995-96 school year), I chose a few books that I'd already read, but which could stand up to multiple rereadings: Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott; Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny; The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin; Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams; and all the volumes of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series that were available in paperback at the time.

Lord of Light turned out to be the one I got the most use out of. It's hard to figure out a meaningful number for how many times I read the thing, as one of the joys of rereading books is that you don't have to read them in any order; you can open them at random and go on for as long as you like. But it's safe to say that I've read the thing upwards of a hundred times, and still found nuances I'd previously missed every time. I'd call it Zelazny's masterpiece, but while I've read most of his books, I still haven't gotten around to reading the Amber series, so I'll reserve judgement on that.

And let's not get into Jack of Shadows, largely because it's been years since I read it, and I'd undoubtedly mess up on the details. But given that he was writing in a time when people took the genre lines pretty darn seriously (as opposed to now, when "SF" stands for "speculative fiction" more often than not), it's a wonder he wasn't run out of town on a rail.