Bleeding Fiction

So, today's Christmas. At least here in the States. In the world of Eastern Orthodox Christianity Christmas won't be until January 7th. The last of the "Twelves Days of Christmas," as it were. I've always wondered where that "Twelve Days" thing comes from, and I've often had a sneaking suspicion that Mary was in labor for 12 days before she gave birth to Jesus. Apparently that's not the case, which is probably for the best.

So, I got a bunch of presents. I keep telling my parents they don't need to get me presents anymore, but in all honesty I'm happy they haven't been paying attention. The stuff I really want is always impossible to find in the mall, so instead Christmas ends up as a sort of "stock-piling" holiday for me - a chance to build up my collections of stuff. This year I was pleasantly surprised to get the Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler novels I asked for, though, so that was cool. Still, most of the stuff I really want, like the Borges collection or the Journey to the West, I'll have to get for myself.

The best part of this Christmas, though, was that my grandmother made Death Cookies, which she hasn't done in about three years. Marc calls these things "Powdered Death Slugs," but in Greek they're "Kourabiedes," which (according to my grandmother) translates into "Butter Cookies." In simplest terms they're butter, flour and eggs mixed together and covered with powdered sugar. They dissolve into a paste when you put them in your mouth and if you try to eat more than, say, one of them at once you're basically going to choke and die; hence the nicknames. It's worth noting that every recipe I've been able to find online, calls for brandy, cognac or orange juice in the mix and several call for cloves. I've seen them made with chopped walnuts, too. But my grandmother doesn't use any of that. Just butter, flour, eggs and sugar.

I'm going to Ogre's tomorrow, though, and I only have a plate-full, not a whole tray, so they'll likely be gone by the end of the night. Ah, pity.

My mother's uncle died on Friday. He was eighty seven years old, had Parkinson's disease and had spent the past month in the hospital, so his death didn't exactly come as a shock. The funeral was this morning and I learned an interesting bit of family history. This uncle and his sister, my long-gone grandmother, used to shower at the local "Y" instead of showering at their home. Why? Because their father had turned their bathtub into a whiskey distillery. Oh yes, that's right, he was a bootlegger in the age of prohibition. When you consider that my grandfather on my mother's side was a card-carrying Communist and labor organizer in the Jimmy Hoffa tradition, my mother's family looks really interesting...

Anyway, after the funeral we went to my uncle's house to sit Shiva (pronounced like a Bostonian pronouncing "shiver"). This is a week-long Hebrew tradition that involves nightly prayers and the family sitting around talking about the dead. Friends and non-immediate family bring food for the week and the immediate family covers the mirrors. The idea here, as I understand it, is that you don't think about the normal things you think about in life - cooking or hygiene - for the week so that you can worry, instead, about coping with your loss. As far as mourning rituals go it's probably one of the best in terms of helping.

All the same, I think I'd rather if we had been sitting Shiva (pronounced with an "e" as in "evil") instead. You know, Shiva the Destroyer, the Hindu god of destruction. Imagine a group of elderly Jews, some of them orthodox and with long beards, sitting around discussing my uncle George with the giant blue-skinned, four-armed cosmic dancer wreathed in flame. Or better yet, picture the elderly Jews sitting and talking while Shiva utters his sacred mantra "om" and rampages, Godzilla style, around town.

These are the things I think about at funerals.

Om. Seriously. Om.

The past two nights were the first of the Jewish holiday of Passover. This is the holiday best known for Charlton Heston being cool. Or maybe for being the event at which was held the Last Supper. Or, just possibly, for the Jews being freed from slavery in Egypt.

Jewish holidays are pretty much binge and purge affairs. That is to say they involve either a feast or a fast. This one is a feast (specifically called a "seder" here). But much of the feast is the telling of the story of why you're having the feast, so the people at the table will never forget. In theory this is great, only everyone at the table knows the story already. Even my little cousin has it down cold, and she's five. It's not exactly a challenge to remember.

So, every year we read the Passover story and every year the seder gets shorter. It's been like this ever since I was a kid. "We'll start on page 13," says my uncle, who leads us through the service. He skips pages left and right. What's left he reads through as fast as he can. Me, I'd rather we dispense with the reading, watch the Ten Commandments on DVD and then sit down to eat. It'd make the whole thing much more enjoyable.

I mean, reading the story as if it were this great thing sort of gets to me, when you're basically sitting around celebrating the fact that God's a prick. Not to offend or anything, but you've got to be a real asshole to send Moses off to tell Pharaoh to let your people go and then go out, harden Pharaoh's heart so that he doesn't do it and then slap his ass down with the plagues. One of God's shittier moments, I'd say.

It's a grand week for holidays. Today is Easter, which is fun because it's the only holiday I know of that celebrates the living dead. But beyond that, Easter's always been interesting for me because my family usually celebrates it on an entirely different day than the rest of the States. The Greek Orthodox form of Christianity doesn't use the Gregorian calendar, after all. This is all because of something called The Great Schism, which I don't need to go into here. Suffice it to say that it was because various and sundry medieval people were being people and this year is odd because the two Easters are on the same day.

Of much greater importance is the fact that I have no Death Cookies. My grandmother isn't really able to stay on her feet these days, so she's really not up to making cookies. I'm very disappointed. I may have to take drastic measures and make them myself, using one of the many recipies I've found online. But it would scare me to have such power. I think I might have to make them all the time and eating so many of the things would surely kill me.

But it would be a good death...

My parents got a dog. It's a pug, so it has an ugly, smash in little face and it craps as much as a horse. To say nothing of the drool. And the smell. And the way it has to be walked. And the way my parents have given it the run of the dining room so that I have to step over a small fence to get to the kitchen. I don't like dogs at the best of times. I am not, to put it charitably, what one would call a "dog person." They're just too needy. And what do they give back in return? Wet, slobbery affection. Pass, thanks.

Still, my parents have been dreaming of having a pug for years. Ever since they dog-say for my sister's dead boyfriend's pug, Hoosier, for a few months one summer. So, they love the snotty little thing and it loves them right back. It also loves visitors, so I'll have to figure out a good time to bring Aaron and Vitaly by. You guys loved Hoosier, after all.

This dog's name is Zoe. My dad wants to call it "Z" for short. I figure Zoe's short enough. And the dog is short. It's a baby, the size of a squirrel or a large rat, maybe. The vet said it can't go outside for another month becauase a hawk could see it, snatch it and fly off to eat it. A hawk. In northern New Jersey. Who'd've thunk it?

So, there's the dog. Thankfully I've only got to see it once a week.

I told my parents today about UW's change in policy for graduate students, about how it means the whole prospect's likely to cost more money now. My mom suggested I pretend that Jeni and I are dating so that I could claim I have a "partner employed locally." Why do so many of my parents' suggestions for things to do in my life involve lying?

Erik took the idea of a fake relationship with Jeni and ran with it. By the time he was done I was pretending to be gay and faking a relationship with a guy who was actually gay (and had a crush on another guy we were both friends with) while we all avoided the attention of our neighbor, Mr. Strictman, who worked for the University. I interned, part time, at the Experience Music Project and was in a band and thereby had a wacky group of friends. I don't remember where Jeni was supposed to fit into the final picture, if I was pretending to date the gay guy and not her.

Why is is so easy to turn my life into a sitcom? And why does the resulting sitcom resemble nothing so much as the bastard love-child of Three's Company and Friends?

My mother's life is currently defined by a nebulous set of fluctuating "numbers." They measure the familiar statistics of blood pressure and white blood cell count, as well as the levels of obscure chemicals that even those of us with backgrounds in Latin or Greek are hard-pressed to trace the roots of. Her doctors do this all by sticking her with a syringe and drawing blood from one of the veins in her arm, the search for which is often in ve... is sometimes pointle... is many times futile. It's a strange thing indeed to watch doctors draw blood from between my mother's toes, as if she's some sort of inverse heroin addict with a need to hide her track marks. Regardless, when her numbers are "good" (which can mean high or low, depending on the particular trait in question), my mother's healthy; when her numbers are "not so good" (the doctors never use the word "bad"), she's not.

Recently her numbers have been "a little troublesome," so she trekked off to the hospital for a few tests. Several stabs with the needle and an overnight stay later, the doctors had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that they were able to halt the rejection of her kidney. The bad news is that she has diabetes. So saying, they welcomed her into the world of twice-daily blood tests and insulin shots. Self-administered, mind you, which isn't so great. My mother's not exactly the most... erm... responsible person when it comes to taking her medicine. She's just a little absent-minded these days. Fortunately, my father's anal-retentiveness and pathalogical worry will likely keep her sticking herself with the needle at the appropriate times. Huh. Imagine that being useful.

In theory, say the doctors, the diabetes was caused by the steroids she's on (some insanely high dosage that would apparently make a professional body-builder blush) and will go away once they reduce the dosage of steroids. I didn't know diabetes was the sort of thing that "went away," but apparently it is. Or could be. That's sort of interesting.

So, the prognosis? Bad, but not as crappy as it could be and heaps better than the time we thought my mother's nurses accidentally gave her hepatitis. Now my mother gets to wait. She's good at that by now.

Blog: Slightly wonked due to a hacker. Bastard. Host is cool, providing on-site visits and discussions of poetry. Also, she fixed the blog. Mostly. Last update along these lines lost to the digital ether. Good riddance, I say.

Vitaly: Got married recently. Yay! Nice wedding, very traditional, right down to the break-dancing-Brad-Pitt-look-alike rabbi.

Kiki: Now engaged. About damn time. She and Raphael have only been dating for eight and a half years.

Erin McKeown: Free show at South Street Seaport past Thursday. Excellent music, as always. Open air = poor acoustics but great breeze. Too much sitting, not enough dancing.

Visitations: Something Positive went pro; creator-dude Randy got mad donations and quit his job to do the comic. That's cool. Also, Bekah started a livejournal. Its bilingualness astounds me. Go be astounded too.

Lena: What I said I'd write: Everything she says about why she and I should not be together makes perfect sense. But my life bleeds fiction and makes no sense, so there. Plus, I love fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.

Mother: In hospital for non-serious, non-diabetes problems. Yeesh.

Borges: My current reading. Witty and self-deprecating. Major images are mirrors, labyrinths and knife-fights. Very cool.

Saved: A movie. Pokes fun at very religious types. Funny as hell. Go see it. I want to see it again. And own it on DVD.

Work: Increasingly less busy. Or decreasingly busy. Whichever. Yay.

School: Registration papers to arrive... soon?

Writing: It's June. Leave me the fuck alone.

Back to a regular schedule presently.

The local NBC affiliate is broadcasting the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with a time delay rather than live. This means that us folks here on the Left Coast can watch the whole parade, instead of only the last half hour or so. It's a nice touch, a small comfort for someone who's woken up to the parade every year before now.

But, parade or not, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, my favorite day of the year. It has been for as long as I can remember. Of course there's the humanitarian nature of the day and the human interest stories that dominate the news, but for me the pleasure of Thanksgiving is much more personal. For me, Thanksgiving is a holiday without the burdens of holidays; it's joy without the attendant pressures. There aren't any onerous religious obligations, there's no need to dress nice. There's no commercial build-up insisting that we buy, buy, buy. I don't have to run around and visit more than one house.

Without these burdens, and with my family divorced from the usual insanity of their regular lives, I can actually enjoy their company. They stop being lunatics and become just people. We go to one aunt and uncle's house and see my favorite relatives. It's... well, not normal, but happy. It's the day I get to enjoy the things I don't get to enjoy or have on any other day, that half the time I don't even want to have.

This day there's no where I'd rather be than home with my family, which makes it particularly painful that I'm so far away. I've received three different invitations from people here to spend my day with them. That's incredibly touching and I'm very greatful, but it just wouldn't feel right. I've always said that my friends are my real family, and that's very true, but there are few friends who are family enough for today and none of them are here.

All of which makes today a little sad for me. So I'm just going to ignore the rest of Thanksgiving for this year. Maybe next year will be different.

Stem-cell research is important to me. I've said this before. I've mentioned new organs and fluids, made from your own substance and guaranteed never to be rejected. I've mentioned the strokes, siezures and weakness of mind and body that I hope I can avoid. I don't know if I've expressed enough how important this is to me. Let me try now.

When an organ gives out on you, things change. There's a hole inside you. And you know that a lot of your friends and family could fill it, if they wanted to. If they could bring themselves to make that sacrifice. It's a big sacrifice to make, there's no denying that, but it's not like it'd kill them.

You, on the other hand, you're dying. Without that organ, you've only got a matter of years. And when you think about that you look at your friends and family, people you've known your whole life, who've stood by you through every break up, through every move and new job and every piece of crap that life can throw at you and who swear they'll stand by you through this, too, but who just can't bring themselves to give up an organ.

You look at them and you hate them. You think about every good turn they've done you, every hug they've given, every time they've made you laugh, every dollar they loaned you when you were desperate, every ride they gave you, every time they watched your kids and every time they just gave you their shoulder while you cried and you push all of that out of your mind and you hate them with every fiber of your being. Because they are letting you die.

And then, hating the people who are closest to you in all the world, you have to find a way to look yourself in the mirror the next morning.

There are certain people out there who feel that it's acceptable for this to happen. They claim to believe, rightly or wrongly, that an embryonic stem cell is alive and possesses a soul. They are making traditional cloning research in this country exceedingly difficult. They would like to make it impossible.

I want to believe that what they want will never happen. I believe that, as Victor Hugo wrote, "No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come." I hope that, if it's ever necessary, doctors can create new organs and fluids from my own body in order to let me live. I believe, very strongly, that we can find a way to fight against, or at least work around, every epidemic of cowardice and ignorance and fear. Science may have now done just that:

A trick that persuades human eggs to divide as if they have been fertilised could provide a source of embryonic stem cells that sidesteps ethical objections to existing techniques. . . �Embryos� created by the procedure do not contain any paternal chromosomes � just two sets of chromosomes from the mother � and so cannot develop into babies.

Just got off the phone with my mum. We were talking about a few different things (current projected close date on the restaraunt: January 15th) and out of the blue my mum said "So do you want me to buy you a plane ticket for Christmas? I mean, you must be upset that you're not travelling this winter, so I thought maybe instead of coming here you might want to go visit your friends in Moscow."

The searing chest pain warred with my desire to scream "Yes please!" at the top of my lungs.

It's not really a Lena thing, this. Time has put a big enough cap on that that it's mostly bittersweet memory and nostaligia, at least from this distance, and if there's a pair of thing's I've grown really comfortable with over the past few years it's bittersweet memory and nostalgia.

No, this is more about travelling in general. I keep having moments, little flashes, where I think about something foreign. The exact blending of scents on the street triggers a memory of St. Petersburg, a passage in a paper reminds me of something I drank in Moscow, the view out a classroom window strikes me as, strangely, belonging in Budapest.

So I miss travel. Big shock there. I'll get back to it soon enough, in a year or so. But meantime I just figured everyone should know.

Right. Back from my vacation-ish thing. Not much point in re-capping what I did, since I saw a good portion of you while I was in that there New York Metropolitan Area.

Also, I didn't do much that was unique. Fun, sure. But not unique. It was the usual round of restaurants and bars, staying out drinking and eating and talking to all hours of the night. I got to see almost everyone I expected to and even a few folks who popped up out of nowhere and took me by surprise. Good stuff.

Some highlights of the trip:

House of Flying Daggers: Cool, but not as cool as Hero. It was more of a "standard fare" of wuxia movie than something with a huge amount of style. Also, some of the plot twists, while leading to a cool climax, were a little hard to stomach of believe.

Phantom of the Opera: I hate seeing movies with my parents, because they do things like talk through them. Phantom was visually spectacular, the girl who played Christine was beyond belief and Minnie Driver Rocked. I was disappointed in much of the characterization of the Phantom himself and at the deletion of a few of Raoul's lines. Overall, very worthwhile but I preferred the version I've seen on stage so many times.

Gifts: I would really rather my parents didn't get me gifts anymore, but if they're going to, they could've done worse than they did this year. They got me an iPod! A 40G iPod! Woo hoo! Also, they got me the first two volumes of the collected Peanuts, which may actually be cooler than the iPod. I love Peanuts and the first two volumes, filled with things I've never seen before, strips that are so different but still so identifiably Peanuts, are just beyond belief.

Surface Area: My parents don't really believe in flat surfaces. If they see something flat, they feel an inexplicable need to make it bumpy. As a result, their furniture is draped over with small statues, piled decorative boxes, plants and wicker. This makes it very hard for people like me to do things like put our wallets, keys, etc. down anywhere when we go to sleep at night.

Furniture: I bought a desk while I was away, through a mail-order catalog. Also, a bookshelf, through Ikea.com. These things should be here shortly. Yay!

Writing: I didn't write as much as I planned to. I didn't fall far flat, though. I wrote one short story, outlined a second, wrote a half-dozen Fables and took copious notes for two comic proposals (the only thing keeping me from writing the proposals themselves being that I've no clue what one looks like or is supposed to go in to one and couldn't find said information with the resources I had to hand).

And that's the most of it. I had a good trip, overall, and was happy to see everyone, but I'm also happy to be back. I missed having my own space, I missed defining my own schedule to do simple things (like, say, shower) and I missed the atmosphere of (as a few folks insisted on calling it) the Pacific Northwest.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled life.

When I left New Jersey after my winter break, I left a lot of stuff behind. It was a combination of Christmas presents, stuff I bought for myself while I was there and stuff I'd left behind when I moved. I just couldn't fit it all on the plane and still have room for my clothes. So, I asked my parents to ship it to me. In typical fashion, they put it off and forgot for a long while. I finally got my stuff - some CDs, some DVDs, assorted books and the wonderful, wonderful first two volumes of the Complete Peanuts today.

As awesome as all that is, though, the best part of the package was the note that my cousin Neil - the fellow who actually did the shipping, through his company's mailing room - slipped into the box. It was a nothing note, just a quick "hello and stay well," but it means a lot, seeing as it came from my hero.

My cousin Neil's my hero. He has been since I was very young. There's nothing he did to inspire this. He didn't fight off a marauding bear or anything. It's just his personality. He was always friendly to everyone I saw him interact with and that friendliness was always sincere. I was never naive enough to think that Neil didn't have any problems or that there weren't people he disliked. On the contrary I was always sure that whatever my problems and whoever I hated, Neil had experienced and hated worse. But he was still so sincere and that made him my hero.

He was always the guy I wanted to be when I got older and now, now that he's working and married and about to have his second child, that really hasn't changed. Neil didn't get his life's ambition (he wanted to play professional baseball), though it wasn't for lack of trying. But he's happy with what he's got, because he sees the value in it. I hope that, even if I don't ever realize all of my ambitions, I can recognize the same value in the things I have in my life.

It's nice to get a reminder, every now and then, that I still have a hero. S'cuse me, I've got to call him up and say thank you.

I excerpt you a brief quotation from my weekly call from my family. Let it serve as proof that they are all FUCKING NUTS:

"I was talking to the lady who I babysit for," my sister said, "well, I babysit her son. And she said she has a cousin who lives in Seattle."

"Uh-huh," I said. When people say things like this to me, the next words are usually a varient of "so I thought I could set you two up on a date." It makes me a little guarded.

"Her cousin said that there are a lot of cults in Seattle, so I was worried about you."

"Well," I said, laughing, "I appreciate your concern, but I think I'm going to be ok. I'm not the type to join a cult and I don't think I'm in any danger of being kidnapped and used as a ritual sacrifice."

"Ok. Because I was worried."

My sister soon handed the phone over to my father, and I was still laughing over this little exchange. He asked me what I was laughing at.

"My sister, you know, sometimes she reminds me a lot of you and mom." I related our conversation to him. I said, "I told her that I appreciated her concern, but that I wasn't going to be joining any cults and that I wasn't really much..."

My dad, without a hint of humor or irony, but with a little bit of skepticism, cut me off to slowly say "Well, good. I'm glad we don't have to worry about that, at least."

This is the sort of shit my parents worry about. They hear a dumb little thing like this, and they're up at night worried that I'm going to JOIN A CULT.

I'm at a loss for words, here...

People who need organ transplants have their names put on a list. They keep track of your blood type, so that doctors will know if you're compatible with any organ that comes available, but they also track your age and mental state. This is how doctors decide who gets an organ. Kids, those younger than eighteen years old, they get precedence. After that, it mostly how long your name's been on the list.

My mother is going back on the kidney list.

She's not getting credit for the six years she spent on that list before her transplant.

My mom got a new kidney a year and a half ago. And now it's falling apart. She had a kidney virus this past summer, which no one had bothered to mention to me until now. She's had a few biopsies, to help correct her medication levels. And with all of that, the kidney just isn't strong enough to hold together any more, and her body isn't strong enough to hold on to it.

So it's only a matter of time. A month, six months at most. But when it's done, it's done, and my mom goes back on dialysis. I've explained, before, how you can come to hate the people that you love while you're waiting for a transplant and how that leads you to hate yourself, but I haven't really explained, here, what dialysis means. It means three days a week, for four hours at a time, in the hospital. It means a cold room and a machine that drains the blood out of your body, filters out the poisons, and pumps the blood back in. It means twelve hours a week when you're too weighed down with tubes and needles to move without interrupting the process and hours of wakefulness after that when you're too tired to think.

Dialysis means a very real risk of stroke and seizure and the mental degredation they bring, where you struggle to remember words you use every day, where you have to force yourself to focus through a haze every minute in order to understand an episode of Law & Order and where, at the most extreme, you can stare directly at your own child and not know who he is.

It means about a decade, max, of life expectancy. I means you might not live to see your children get married. It means that you're unlikely to live to see your grandchildren born.

I'm not big on "fair." Life isn't fair, and I don't expect it to be. Life is suffering. But there are some things that strain my acceptance of that a bit past the breaking point.

As I've said before, and as anyone who's known me for a while can probably attest to, my parents are just fucking insane. Today I received further proof.

I checked my mail and found an envelope from my parents. Inside said envelope was a note and a newspaper clipping. The note read "don't go mountain climbing." The newspaper clipping was titled "American climber dies on Mt. Everest."

My parents usually have some logic underlying their insanity, no matter how twisted it might be, so I figured I'd read the article to see if I could find it. And there it was, plain as day, the first word in paragraph two: "Seattle." The dead American climber was from Seattle.

In a way I suppose it's flattering, and not just for the concern. I mean to say that my parents clearly think I lead a tremendously interesting life; the sort of life that would prompt me to head off to the highest peak in the world (or some other mountain, I guess) and climb it over, say, the course of a weekend. I laugh, but that's the sort of crazy I can appreciate.

This past week's kept pretty nicely in theme with the rest of the month of November and been mostly about relationships. Not mine (and, given my mid-month problems in that department, that's probably a good thing). No, this was a week about other people's relationships. That said, my friend's relationships are mostly not something that it's my place to discuss on my blog, so this is just a place-holder, a bit of digital string tied around a virtual finger to remind my future self, when I read back on this entry later, that this past week So-And-So started dating, Someone's new guy may be crazy and Another Person got turned down in a most uncool way.

That said, there is one relationship I'm cool talking about, at least a little: Aaron and Jen's. Why am I cool talking about it? Because they got married a week ago today, and that's all public and whatnot to begin with. Plus it's just awesome, and I was thrilled that I got to be there for it.

Best part of the wedding? Well, no offense to Aaron and Jen, but I think it was the shrimp wrapped in bacon served during the cocktail hour. Serving something like that just takes a very special kind of class.

Also, because I had to hit the Right Coast for said wedding, I got to be with my family on Thanksgiving. There are some things in life that, years gone by, are colored by the weight of nostalgia. They're things that, if you ever get back to them, are better in memory than in reality. I'm happy to report that Thanksgiving dinner with my family isn't like that. It was every bit as great as I remember it being, and I would only complain that it was just too short. I really do love Thanksgiving.

Back on the Left Coast, now, and spent today getting reaquainted with my bed, my bookshelves, my tv and my local grocery store. Tomorrow I'm back to something resembling normal.

I travel a lot less now than I used to, but in English that still translates to a fair bit of time on the road. The more complex travelling gets - especially in the holiday season, when travelling means checking in five minutes after your flight was due to leave, rushing through security and then dashing breathless down the concourse to reach the gate in time - the more I think that love is simple. I think love is as simple as someone waiting for you at the airport when your flight lands.

I had to take a shuttle bus home.

It was a good trip, all in all, though I couldn't help but feel... small... while I was away. School is part of that; the more time that goes on with me in school and unemployed, the more my relationships to people - my parents in particular, but most other people, too - shift back into the college frame of reference I thought I'd given up a few years ago. It's probably because I have the same lack of control over my ultimate fate now as I did then; I'm living in a microcosm of reality, cut off from what I view as the real world. It's not something that makes me happy.

To put it succinctly: The parents of a 27 year old guy should not reasonably expect that he'll call them to let him know his plane landed safely, nor should they reasonably expect that he'll go away on vacation with them. The guy should have his own money and schedule with which to go on vacation. He should have his own people to vacation with and should have other people to see that he landed safely. Which I guess touches on more than just school, but what can you do?

The other part of feeling small was that I told the same two stories over and over again while I was away; the story of my failing Japanese and trying to switch programs and the story of my failed relationship with Natalie. Leaving aside the little things, the day-to-day trials of a life lived, these are the only stories I had to tell. I feel bad about that; like I haven't done my part to keep my life fictional. Maybe I should take up decathalon sky-diving.

At least people responded well to my stories. I got wishes of luck on the former and mostly disbelieving laugher and teasing on the later; I guess dating a 19 year old wasn't as innocuous as I thought it would be. Which, it was pointed out to me as I was still struggling to understand what happened there, might be exactly the point. Tony East of Camp Winakuee told me Natalie's still young enough to be reading Cosmo and listening to the advice therein. Gailie Gail guessed that, due to our respective ages, Natalie and I were just looking for different things out of a relationship. I didn't really get it; I mean, I'm not looking for much more than a relationship that isn't screwed up.

It took Miriam to put it a way that made sense to me: at 19 years old a lot of people don't want to meet someone who's perfect for them. A lot of people, in fact, run away if they find that person. While most of my friends seem to thumb their noses at these "lot of people," I've seen what Miriam's talking about often enough not to discount it. This sounds more like the whinge of "why do girls always date jerks" than I'm strictly comfortable with; I've never liked that particular canard, and I can't remember a time when I seriously believed it. Still, it's broader in application and makes a bit more sense. So, in my mind at least, order triumphs over chaos.

What else can I say? Christmas and Chanukah are unimportant to me on a religious level and, related to things I discussed above (in paragraph 4), awkward for me on a present-receiving level. New Year's lost its luster when I began staying up until midnight as a matter of course and its placement in the middle of winter hardly makes anything seem new. Seeing friends is always good, except when I don't, as was the case with Doug, owing entirely to the fact that I'm a fuck up and can't wake up when I'm supposed to.

Classes start tomorrow, and I'm on the wait list for everything I want to take. Somehow, this seems perfectly fitting.

Sort of slacked off on talking about stuff, haven't I? Sorry 'bout that. Let's see, what's been going on...

I saw a show at Neumos on Thursday, which I realized I'd been to before, with The Delightful Jeni Garber. The first opening act was Smoosh, who are two 12 year old girls. I'm not joking. I missed their set, though, because I got lost. Second opening act was Viva Voce. Indie band with a rock sensibility; they use kazzoos and love the whammy bar.

Mates of State, my reason for going to the show, closed the night. Last time I saw them live was four years ago; they were good then, but they've gotten a lot better. It's weird to watch them, though. Most bands look at the audience every so often; not so, here. A husband/wife pair (on drums and keyboards, respectively), they spend pretty much their entire time on stage making eyes at each other. It's sweet, but sort of disgusting at the same time.

Speaking of relationships, my folks are apparently trying to set me up with someone. The idea is even sillier when you know that the girl lives in Jersey. It's like a double shot of parental manipulation; move back to Jersey and get set up. Christ. I think I'll just stay in Seattle; I won't stand for this shit.

In unrelated news, I saw Silent Hill on Friday. Highlights included Sean Bean surviving the movie and the main character wearing sturdy boots instead of shitty high heeled shoes. I wasn't so happy with the ending, though that may be more a reflection of my opinions on horror movies than on this movie in particular. Cool and well done, though, overall, but not as scary as I thought it'd be. Maybe a good thing, since I'm sort of a pansy when it comes to horror.

I think that about covers it. I'll check back in with something entertaining soon.

Little things can sneak up on you. Deadlines. Traffic signals.

Kidneys.

A sleepy Alabama night saw a young couple driving down the long road towards Birmingham. The husband was behind the wheel, a little bit tired, but pushed on by thoughts of the Labor Day barbecue that was waiting for him the next day at his parents' house. He caught himself sniffing the air for cornbread. His wife caught him, too, and jabbed him playfully in the ribs before turning towards the back seat to check on her baby girl, their pride and joy, who'd woken up and was starting to fuss. Neither of them saw the other truck until it was too late.

Hours later, the man wrapped his one good arm around his wife; the other, in a sling, had broken. His wife touched her hand to the clear plastic of a small creche. Their baby lay beneath that bubble, very still. A doctor, waiting a respectful distance away, coughed and the woman grimaced at the sound. The stitches in her cheek pulled her face too tight. "It's for the best, isn't it," she said into her husband's chest. "At least this way part of her will live on." The man took one last look at his baby girl and then nodded to the doctor.

That's how I imagine it, anyway. All I know for sure is that my parents got the call at 6:30 yesterday morning: a kidney was being flown to New York from Alabama and it was a match for my mother. Could she make it to the hospital? The day was a flurry of activity, but by 10:30 at night my mom was in recovery with another, tiny kidney working inside her. If all goes well over the next few days, my mom will be in the pink and healthier than she's been in ages.

Two strange facts, though. First, the doctors haven't bothered to remove either the pair of kidneys she was born with or the one she got from my dad a few years back, so my mom has four kidneys floating around inside right now.

Second, it really was a baby whose kidney she got, which makes the whole thing a somewhat mixed blessing. In medical terms, though, babies are pretty much ideal - succulent young baby flesh is highly adaptable and extremely hardy, with a long life ahead of it. The tiny kidney will grow to full adult size in about a month. Weird, no?

There's a quote from Sandman that goes "the price of getting what you want is getting what once you wanted." So true, so true.

While I lived in Seattle I'd whine about how Thanksgiving was the one day a year I liked to spend with my family, and how sad I was that I couldn't do that.

Now that I'm back on the east coast and sitting in my parents' living room on the day itself, I can think of maybe three other places I'd rather be.

It was nice to see everyone, don't get me wrong, but the reasons Thanksgiving-with-the-family was so important to me are sort of... gone. I've shifted priorities. I've moved on. I've known that for a few months, I guess; I was comfortably making alternate Thanksgiving plans for next year back in July. But today really drove the point home.

Honestly, it feels a little weird, but also pretty liberating.