this is my life

"Just a fond farewell to a friend...
this is not my life"
Elliott Smith

So do I stay here working and worrying and miss the funeral of a great aunt who felt more like a grandmother, who always whistled while she did dishes, loved "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and worked to connect scattered relatives, like us, transplanted south years ago? It's a thousand miles away. I don't have time for this...For four days of driving. I've got work to do. Lots of it. Papers to write. Papers to grade.

***

That was as far as I got last week. I packed my clothes in 40 minutes and spent 20 gathering the papers and books I should have worked on. Of course I didn't get much done. OK--I admit it. I did virtually nothing. And now I'm paying for it.

But some things are more important than school, hard as that is to believe sometimes. I wouldn't have missed it. I wouldn't even skip the drive with my parents, through the upstate New York throughway in the winter, past the severely pruned vineyards and the Erie canal, and that strange hill covered with what appear to be plastic pipe periscopes.

You just don't stay in your apartment listening to music and thinking and writing. Work is not meant to justify missing life itself. Even in my current state of anxiety, I recognize the value of the time away from this bubble, in the real world... with the great aunt (now the only surviving sibling of thirteen) and cousins who made room for us during our stay and at the wake, where I saw pictures of my grandmother I've never seen before. She looked so happy on the beach.

As soon as I walked into the funeral home, I remembered the wallpaper in the hallway. My earliest memories about death are in this place. They haven't redecorated, the building is still drafty, and they still have bowls of hard candy scattered about.

"That last time I saw you..." (was probably in this room, at a funeral....)

Yeah. I'm not a kid anymore. Shocking isn't it? So you meet people who knew you 20 years ago, 10 years ago. You talk about yourself, and try to mitigate whatever your proud father is telling his family about you, and think-- I've got great parents, and so what if I want to hide behind the flower arrangements now and then. wht-- who cares if everyone thinks I'm amazing.

***

I had an extra hot latte with a double shot today, and as I tried to do some research in the cafe, "Somewhere over the rainbow" came on...a version I've heard countless times and will always associate with my great aunt. I couldn't have imagined a more cliched conclusion, but I guess I don't have to.

procrastinating

It is a dark and stormy night.
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Quote of the day: "She had that unique ability to--before she finished her first sentence-- alienate everyone else in the room."
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I have so much to do that I'm perpetually in a near-panicked state. But now that I have an evening to work, I can accomplish nothing. I have nervous energy, which is normal for the last couple of weeks of the quarter. I need the adrenaline to deal with everything, but instead of selecting one small, do-able task, my mind is flitting from one insurmountable task to the next. In an effort to focus, I have some fairly distracting music on. Sometimes that helps, because I have to devote a bit of energy to listening to the music and not getting too caught up in it. It's not helping. I'm just getting distracted by both the music and major tasks.

Thanksgiving eve

I'm home for Thanksgiving. I'm in my brother's room, listening to his music on his computer (The Decembrists). I've been getting ready for a family dinner tomorrow--making cornbread for dressing, a double batch of angel biscuits, four pie crusts. (Yes I make pie crust by hand. It's worth it, and as I proved this afternoon, it's possible to make four at once, which is pretty efficient.)

My parents and I snuck German chocolate cake for dinner...It's for tomorrow, but my cousin dropped it off early. We couldn't resist.

A few minutes ago, I finished peeling and slicing the apples for tomorrow morning's breakfast pie, a Thanksgiving tradition from my dad. We always make apple pie for my brother--with peeled apples and sugar. He loves apple pie... He usually has it for his birthday rather than a cake and as a little boy managed to convince my then health-food obsessed mother that apple pie was just not the same with wheat bran crust, apple peels, and minimal or alternative sweetener. "Come on Mom! It's not even worth it if you won't use plenty of real sugar--and peel the apples." This year, the kid isn't here, but of course I'm making his apple pie anyway...They don't so much celebrate Thanksgiving in England, and what is marketed as "apple pie" is very nice but something else altogther. We'll have to eat apple pie for him.

So, my apples are draining, my crust is chilling, and I'm loading the dishwasher again. "I'm thinking about having a cup of coffee," my mom says. My mom doesn't drink coffee at night. What's up? "Oh- it's 10, I guess it's too late, but it does sound good... If your brother were here, he'd convince me." I offer to make some coffee so she can lie awake twitching and thinking about him.

That kid is charismatic. He convinces people that whatever he wants to do is really in their best interests. "Oh come on- It'll be fun." He'd make super strong coffee, it would smell good, and we'd all have some and stay up for hours. We'd probably go to the midnight showing of the latest Harry Potter movie. Yeah-- it would be fun.

Happy Thanksgiving kid.

government censors confidential info about extraterrestrials?

Without government censorship, "People could read confidential information about aliens in daily newspapers."

stream of consciousness

My grandmother loved Whitman. She would often look at the bookshelf and request her copy of Leaves of Grass. I hadn't read any Whitman myself until assigned it last week...

I'm having tea; it's 5 p.m. and from my bedroom window, I see that for the first time in two days, the sky is not gray.

Instead of reading Leaves of Grass, I'm thinking about my grandmother, who taught me how to play dominoes, and let me win, though she never let my mother win.

I'm listening to NPR; a man explores his lobotomy...His step-mother hated him, it seems. He talks to his father about it for the first time. He attains a sense of peace upon realizing that his lobotomy did not damage his soul. He seems incredibly forgiving, and I wonder why...That lobotomy may have left his soul intact, but there must be something wrong with somebody who is not consumed by warping anger and a furious sense of justice?

Perhaps this unbidden question points toward the cynicism that most people have about faith. It just doesn't make sense unless you have it, since, though logical to a point, the phenomenon inherently involves the not knowable. My favorite definition of faith: "Faith is being sure of what you hope for" (Heb. 11:1).


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I'm making a new mix. Today, my old mixes are old.
Can I get from "By the Way" (Red Hot Chili Peppers) to Madeleine Peyroux's "Don't Cry Baby" in 9 songs...I selected the songs on intuition, apparently based on my perception of the mood of the piece, ignoring specific lyrics, which I don't tend to remember very well anyway.
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the Petrarchan conventions:
devotion by the lover
rejection by the beloved
acceptance of the pain of rejection
ambivalence to desire
hyperbole
trials at the lady's hand
love as spiritual
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mouth of the river

Slightly more to the left is the house where my brother was born...To the right, toward the Atlantic, is my first home.