I left Cambridge last Monday at ~8am, slept on both planes I took to Puerto Rico (I was sitting next to a man, and I don’t talk to men on airplanes, they’re boring), and then shopped all afternoon/night with my mom and my grandmother. I finally made it home by 2am after not having really slept the night before. I went to bed at around 3ish am  and woke up at around 3ish pm. I spent my afternoon eating, talking and reading “Memoirs of a Geisha” and last night I decided to go to bed at around 2pm. I intended to start shifting back a little my sleeping schedule and try to reach that point at which I had a ‘normal’ sleeping schedule. 

In two days at home, I had slept almost 1 day off! Now that’s what I call productivity. 23 hours of sleep in two days… that would normally take me 3-4 days to achieve at MIT. 

So anyways, let’s talk about Christmas. At home the tradition we have is go to my grandmother’s house to celebrate Christmas on Christmas eve. We exchange gifts, do a ‘secret santa’ among the older ones (people ~16-70 years old) and spend some time together making fun of each other or whatever else makes us happy. Today people made fun of my beautiful mother because of a few extra pounds she has (or so they claim!), and my mom at some point cried!

Well, don’t get upset just yet, it wasn’t a ‘really crying’ kind of thing. If you’ve spent a few years with my mother you’d know that crying is her hobby. It’s just something she does. It’s not like she has to be sad or anything to cry, sometimes she just  decides to cry because… it’s time to cry. As a teenager my mother wanted to be an actress. She settled for a career in marketing, but subconsciously decided to make her life a permanent act, the world being her huge stage. She goes through life using her marvelous acting skills to achieve anything she wants, or sometimes she uses them for no particular reason. Out of all her marvelous skills, crying is one of her favorite things. She’s really good at it. If you’ve ever seen someone crying whose face turns completely red, eyes are red and watery, and you think they must have been crying horribly for at least an hour… that’s not the case with my mother. My mom can get there in 1 minute for no reason. Five seconds if there’s a reason. I kid you not. 

Traditionally after spending the night at my grandma’s we come back home and go to bed, and in the morning (as early as we wake up once the sun is out) we run to see where Santa put the gifts so we can open them and celebrate Christmas. As a kid I always wanted to just stay up all night so I could get my gifts as soon as I heard Santa. Sadly that never worked, I always fell asleep at some point before Santa decided to come to my house.

I guess that after having slept 23 hours in two days, my body is congratulating me by making me stay awake all night on Christmas morning waiting for Santa! Except that now everyone in my house knows that Santa is my mother and she already put the gifts under the tree and said: “we’re not opening them ’til the morning”. 

Why thank you. Now I should go cry too. 

Here is my mommy making a sad face during/after crying today.