Now more than ever

A's mom died last night. I am on a plane to DC tomorrow. The funeral will be Tuesday. I have cried more today than I care to in a month. I am so sad for A and her sister--the whole family of course, but especially A and J. For me the death of my mother was The Primal Loss--like the Platonic Ideal of loss, where everything else, every other particular loss was a facsimile or a shadow of that one. It's an entirely different thing to be motherless in the world.

And of course, I'm emotionally reminded of my own late teens when I thought grief would just swallow me. It felt unsurvivable. I truly don't know how A managed to stay friends with me through my parents' illnesses and my rage and sorrow and self-centered death-wish years. I know she wasn't the picture of mental health herself, but surely there were easier friends to have than me. After my mom died I could barely feed myself. If it weren't for A I don't know what would have become of me.

I remember the night that horrible summer that my high school boyfriend broke up with me. My despair was crushing. And here's the thing: It's not like I was so damn in love with him. But he was a way to be somewhere other than in that house. He would come pick me up and we'd go downtown and drink ourselves into sweet oblivion, a paradise compared to the present reality. I came home and called A's house even though it was around midnight. Her dad answered and I couldn't even speak. I just cried into the phone and he put A on. She just said, "Are you home? I'll be right there." I went outside to wait for her but I had already woken my mother. I was on the front step just weeping, disconsolate. And my mother comes to the door and sees me so upset and starts crying. "I wish there was a way I could make this less hard on you," she says. (And here let me say that while my mother was not exactly mother of the year most of the time, this memory still astonishes me for what it says about her capacity to love and her particular love for me--to be so selfless that you wish your terminal bone cancer was not so hard on your daughter. No greater love.) Anyway, so A came and she had a bottle of tequila in her trunk and I sat in her car and cried and drank every drop. Thank god we do not have to do any of these things twice--be teenagers, bury our parents, bottom out on drugs...

I'm really grateful I could find a flight and that I have the best job in the world that will not just let me miss a three-day meeting off-site but encourage me to go support my friend and say goodbye to her mom.

I will miss you, Robert Rauschenberg.

Despite the fact that I am super-grumpy today, this clip (thank you eecue) made me laugh out loud.



There's much other news to report really, but I haven't had much will to write.

I was supposed to be away this week, but the fates seem to want me in LA. First I'd planned a trip to Spain with the bf, but then that fell through ("that" being a deliberately unclear referent in this sentence). Then I decided to make the best of it and go to ABQ for a week, but A's mother got really ill and A had to go east suddenly. So I am having a total busman's holiday.

A's mother is still in the hospital but is, as of today, what they would call stable except they don't call you stable if you're on a ventilator.

A says, "When god gives you lemons, it's time to get a new god," and I'm pretty on board with that.

More good health news: L's chest CT shows no sign of cancer (yay!).

It's going to be an autumn of great shows. Got tix to Nick Cave in September and My Bloody Valentine in October.

Am contemplating another tattoo, though given that I just spent the equivalent of two car payments on new glasses I think it will have to wait.

There's a spray of bullets for you. Randomness.

Today I
1. bought two pairs of shoes
2. shared a bowl of microwave popcorn with Nic the cat
3. bought tickets for Albuquerque and investigated flights to Minneapolis

I'm still not exactly chipper, but hey, I have new shoes and I'm leaving town in a few weeks. I realized that when I feel low, I usually head right for Travelocity. I guess it beats surfing porn or online gambling.

Work has actually slightly mellowed in prep for next week's conference. We have all been working like sled dogs and it's coming together. Tonight I left by 6pm(!) I'm starting to get very excited about the conference. I move into the hotel Saturday and leave eight days later. That's a long time to live in a Marriott, but I have my coffee supplies and my bath salts. I've hired the cat sitter and I pick up my dry cleaning Friday. By this time next week, the project I have worked on for five years will have been voted on and we'll be on the downhill for the conference week. Sort of hard to believe.

I'm starting to get genuinely excited.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I've been promoted here at work to "Director of Communications," which is a very nice way of saying "King of the S*** Pile" it seems. Anyway, that accounts for a great deal of my silence lately. Our biennial conference is next month and it's definitely felt like "there must be a pony" time here for me.

Then of course, there's the travel. In the past few months I've been to Florida, DC, Denmark, Hungary, and Albuquerque.

And as for the personal life, as they say around here "life has shown up."

All of that said, I had to interrupt my radio silence to share my outrage and disgust about the freshly declassified torture memo. You can find parts one and two in .pdf form here and here. (Thank you Chicago Tribune.) I myself have neither the time nor the emotional stamina to read the whole thing. But here are a couple of snippets for you, courtesy of ABC news:

First this stunning logic which basically amounts to "because these people are not subject to standard law, they are not covered by the Constitution." Or put another way, "Having eliminated Habeas Corpus, we are now moving on to use the Bill of Rights as toilet paper.":

"Unlike imprisonment pursuant to a criminal sanction, the detention of enemy combatants involves no sentence judicially imposed or legislatively required," the memo said. "Accordingly the Eighth Amendment has no application here."

And then there's this:

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

"This national and international version of the right to self-defense could supplement and bolster the government defendant's individual right to self-defense could supplement and bolster the government defendant's individual right."

National self defense my ass. What a crock.

I swear to god this kind of thing makes me want to drive into oncoming traffic.

Thanks for letting me share. I will now return to the pony search.

From a NYT article on the Democratic primary in Florida and Michigan:

Mrs. Clinton won the most votes in primaries in Florida and Michigan in January. But the states held their contests earlier than allowed by the Democratic National Committee’s rules, leading the party to strip them of their delegates to the nominating convention. Neither candidate campaigned actively in the two states, and Mr. Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan.

My favorite shot from the trip:



No matter where in the world you are...



Conor's author picture





St. Basil's in 80 kg of marzipan:

You know when you're almost out of toothpaste and you have to squish the tube with all your might to try to get one more day's worth out of it because you forgot to stop at the drugstore on your way home?


Well, that pretty well describes my relationship to the hours in the day right now.

(Thanks to Hamed Saber for the Creative Commons licensed pic.)

1. Everything is so terribly overheated that it's impossible to sleep with the windows shut.
2. Construction people begin work at 6am.
3. Construction crews enjoy singing rousing Hungarian songs in time with the clanging and banging of their work.

It's my last day in Budapest and I feel a bit murderous. Clearly I'm going to need to learn the phrase "SHUT THE FUCK UP" in Magyar for my next visit.

Grrr.