hey remember that time

i was talking to someone recently, Reading Rainbow style, about how they should read Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. I've read it at least five times, the pages are starting to get torn and dog-eared. After I showed him the cover via-skype, before I put it back on the shelf, I flipped through it yet again. I always forget certain parts and re-discover them each time I open it. For instance:

Jews Have Six Senses
Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing...memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks--when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather's fingers fell asleep from strocking his great-grandfather's damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain--that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.
When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?

Its funny, because I remember the exact instance when I heard this passage outside the context of me with a hot cup of tea reading this on my bed. In the banquet hall-type room at the Top Hotel, prepping ourselves for our trip to the various concentration camps and museums and synagogues in the area. Of course the Top Hotel reminds me of Aaron Stern and I telling each other our life stories on the plane on the way to Prague, "The Top Hotel makes me want to cry," he told me. Which reminds me of my most recent plane ride which reminds me of the one im going to be taking next week which reminds me of last Biennial which reminds me of Leslie saying the Mourner's Kaddish instead of the Mishebarach and how she called me, bawling, to apologize which reminds me of how, at GUCI, we used to make fun of the counselor who said "Kaddish" with a really weird emphasis on the wrong part of the word which reminds me of Shabbat walk dates which reminds me of the application sitting on my desk which reminds me of the to-do list thats sitting beside it which...


my own web of pinpricks.