A Graduation Story

Once upon a time, this blog was more about random stories than how my life was derailing, and I think I'd like to get back to that.  I was trying to think of a good story to tell, and in the process of transferring pictures from my old computer to this new one (permanent hard drive damage, the poor thing was over five years old, anyway) I found this magic moment:

Allow me to explain.  This was the photo in my college's quarterly magazine of my graduation ceremony back in 2010.  It came out after I had already gone on to grad school, but my parents sent it to me because it captured one of the most disappointing moments of their lives.  Please note the circled area of the photo:

That's my family, but more on that in a bit.  First, have a little back story: my parents and older brother came to see me graduate, and it was some complicated business.  My brother lives in Pennsylvania, and was having car trouble at the time this all took place, so my parents drove up to get him and brought him back to Ohio the day before driving six hours to my school in Illinois.  All that car time made them good and worn out, not to mention a little tired of each other by the time I saw them.  We had dinner, packed most of my stuff, then they hit up the hotel and I didn't see them until after the ceremony.  And when I did see them again, they were pissed.

Apparently, my family got up extra early in order to get the best seats for my graduation.  I'm the first of us to get a degree, so it was kind of a big deal, and they were excited.  Over an hour passes.  Then the ceremony starts, and a bunch of really boring and long-winded people speak for an amazingly long period of time.  More hours pass.  Then it finally comes time for us graduates to stand and line up for our walk.  My college is pretty small, but there are still several hundred people to get through, so they are calling the names quickly and we are all basically booking it across the stage.  My time draws near.  In the first row of the audience seating, my family sits up straighter in order to see.

My mother's camera is at the ready.

Then, the unthinkable happens.

Just as my name is called, a large man in purple shuffles by in front of them, blocking their view.  By the time he passes, I'm already done.  They missed it.  Hours upon hours of driving, followed by hours upon hours of droning speeches, all for what?  They had absolutely nothing to show for themselves.  In short, a travesty.

Everything that happened afterwards, the last bit of packing, the "celebratory" dinner, the six hour drive back home, was cast in the gloomy shadow of this nameless, purple-wearing ruiner of my parents dreams.  They even had a picture of him, since my mother already had her finger on the shutter button when he walked by.  All they talked about for days afterwards was this guy and how much he sucked.  I felt bad for them, but I was getting tired of it.  After all, I still graduated, didn't I?  Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it isn't real.  They believe in god, so it shouldn't have been so hard for them.

By the time I moved to southern Ohio for grad school, everything had pretty much blown over.  I was there a couple weeks, still getting settled in, when I got an e-mail from my mother.  "You won't believe this," it read, "they caught it on film!"  Which brings us back to the picture I showed earlier, with my family circled.  Let's take a closer look at them, shall we?

You see that?  That's my family right in the middle of having their view obstructed by an asshat in a purple shirt.  Poor guys.  Just when they were starting to recover, my school had to add insult to injury by immortalizing the moment in print for every current and former student of the institution to see.  I couldn't believe it.  I immediately called my mother, just so she could hear how hard I was laughing.  She did not laugh along.

And so went the first major accomplishment in my life.  At least everyone except my parents got to see it, right?

________

On a somewhat unrelated note, I've been thinking more about this Blogging from A to Z Challenge coming up in April.  At first I was just going to go with random topics, because the thought of having some kind of theme made me cringe.  However, I started trying to pick topics for each letter, and I realized the things I was coming up with were too broad to be addressed in daily entries.  If you haven't noticed, my entries tend to be on the longer side, and I highly doubt I'm going to put together any of my challenge entries together ahead of time, so obviously I am going to have to make them shorter.
So I came up with idea of using songs.  Each day I'll find a song starting with the appropriate letter and tell a little story about its significance or something it reminds me of.  Nice and simple.  I'm also going to try and write a normal entry once a week from now on.  Keeping ideas flowing and getting them out is good for my sanity.  One blog entry and one poem, every week from now until... whenever.  For my health.

Ten Things

Ok so my birthday was Friday, and I decided to make a list of things I like right now in honor of it.  Originally the list was going to be twenty-three things, since that's how old I just became, but the more I thought about it the more I wasn't sure I'd be able to come up with that many things I liked.  So I cut it to ten, for the tenth.  Here we go:

10. The Parlor Mob

I always turn on one of the Music Choice channels when I'm reading, writing, or doing pretty much anything except watching something else on television.  This song came up, and the singer's voice really got my attention.  Upon looking up more of their stuff I've found that these guys are pretty great at being unhappy, and if there's anyone who appreciates the finer points of discontent, it's me.



9. Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse
What you have here is comic about a worm demon who occupies the right eye-sockets of dead bodies in order to fight supernatural crime alongside a stripper and a robot.  Yeah.  I was drawn to this series primarily because of the art, which is amazing.  Ben Templesmith is the artist behind the "30 Days of Night" comics, and if you're curious about what that art actually looks like, you can check out his blog right here.  He writes "Wormwood" as well as illustrates, and the result is one of the best combinations of horror and comedy I've seen in a while.  The horror/comedy combo is kind of "in" these days (Shaun of the Dead and on up from there), but most movies or books in this genre tend to be more like comedies with a few horror elements, or just using some typical horror scenario for the story's backdrop.  Not here.  Here there's some really gory, freaky shit going down.  But it's still funny.  There are demons, leprechauns, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (my favorite!), and a surprising amount of tentacles showing up when you least expect them.  I love it.

8. This Fake Ad for Downton Abbey

If you don't know anything about the real show, this probably isn't very funny.  I for one am obsessed with Downton Abbey.  It's the most ridiculously dramatic thing I've ever seen, and SNL pretty much got it down pat.  We've been quoting "you just pissed off the chicken lady" at my house for the past several days.

7. Extended Family
According to ABC News, January and February have the highest death rates out of the year.  I personally have a lot of experience with deaths in February.  Earlier this week, my cousin's grandfather passed away after a long illness, and his funeral was Saturday afternoon.  It was a military funeral, and afterwards we sang "Happy Birthday" and had cake.
Now, in the technical sense, I am not related to this man.  He was connected to my family through marriage, but a divorce ended that before I was even born.  I didn't realize that until I was a teenager.  The thing is, my family never kicks people out.  Whether it's a divorce or the foster system or your own stupid mistakes, you can still come back and hang out with us, no questions asked.  That's why I knew the man we honored today, and that's the thing I like about extended family.


6. This Picture

This is my brother and I, quite some time ago, at the Universal Studios theme park's King Kong ride.  I was looking for something in the cubboard over the refrigerator and found this instead.  His birthday is this Monday, and I'm sure he'll be thrilled if he ever sees this gem made its way onto the Internet.

5. Dooce
A professional blogger who talks about being a mom, a former Mormon, and haver of emotional problems.  I like her because she a fellow Heather-in-arms who writes beautifully, and consistently introduces me to new music and interesting stuff on the Internet.  Also, she's been blogging since 2001, so there's a fascinating amount of information about this one person available at your fingertips.  You can sit there and act like you're above voyeurism, but everyone knows that's what the Internet is all about.  So click away.  There's a whole life on here.

4. Good Guy Lucifer
So pretty much everything on Quickmeme gets done to death, but there are some real diamonds in the rough within the Good Guy Lucifer category.  As a former studier of religions, and an even more former follower of religions, I have a soft spot for this kind of humor.  Here are a couple of the better offerings:

I particularly like the one about Job, but that's a story for another time.


3. Potbelly Sandwich Shop
We don't have these where I live, but there are plenty of them around the Chicago area, where I was last weekend.  I've heard they sell sandwiches, but all I ever get there is soup.  I love soup.  Soup is one of the better things humanity has come up with over its existence.  There was a Potbelly's right by my college when I was an undergrad, and every couple Sundays I was there for some broccoli cheddar soup and an Oreo milkshake.  I've been told this is an odd combination, but the people saying that are usually getting sandwiches instead, so I don't trust their judgement.
This place also has oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, which I love because most oatmeal cookies have raisins, and I really don't like raisins.  My paternal grandmother used to throw raisins in her apple pies a lot, and I always wondered why someone would willingly ruin such an awesome food with such a nasty shrivelled fruit.  So when I had my chance, I bought a little bag of raisin-free oatmeal cookies to take home.  I've been told that I could easily make these cookies myself, but then they wouldn't feel so special, or rare, and I probably wouldn't like them as much anymore.


2.  Bad Lip Reading
How to explain this... what this site does is take music videos and sound bites and dub over them with words that are completely different, but look the same when you say them.  Does that make any sense?  An example might help.

I love when the Fergie's voice over randomly says "piano".  BLR has also started doing soundbite voice overs for the Republican candidates, and I can't believe how well done they are.  It really looks like Gingrich is talking about crumping.



1. An Idiot Abroad
It shouldn't be this funny to see someone so miserable.  But it is, and that's why Ricky Gervais pays for his friend Karl Pilkington to travel around the world and experience extreme discomfort for a television audience.  Last year this poor guy was sent to the New Seven Wonders of the World (the ones are gone, I guess, so they had to pick out new ones).  It sounds really cool, and under normal circumstances the travel would probably be fun, but they go out their way to make Karl's experience unhappy.  When he goes to see Petra, he is set up with a group living out in the desert who feed him lamb's eyes and testicles for dinner.  They also tend to set him up in shady hotels and give him "guides" that make him miserable.  At the Great Pyramids (the only "old" wonder he sees), he meets up with this new-agey couple that thinks the pyramids connect to some kind of extraterrestrial life?
Anyway, now there's a season two, and they're making Karl do things that most people want to do before they die.  He chooses which thing he's going to do, but then Ricky goes behind his back and pretty much makes the trip unbearable.  The last episode I saw, where Karl wanted to go whale watching, they forced him to go dog-sledding and glacier-watching (don't know what else to call it, they were looking at glaciers), and then they set him up on a fishing boat for several days where he's forced to work.  By the time he actually gets to see some whales, he's so tired and seasick that he doesn't even give a shit and barely looks at them.  Here he is dog-sledding:

Yeah, he calls the dogs "twats" at one point.  It's not all about revelling is someone else's pain, though, I genuinely think Karl is a funny guy and I like hearing him talk about what he's going through.

So there's my advertisements for the ten things I like.  I'm so glad I didn't go with my original idea of twenty-three, since this list ended up taking three days for me to make.  If it was any longer I'd be passed out somewhere bleeding out my ears by now.

Shifts in the Gears

This past weekend I went on a trip to the Chicagoland area, where I went to college, to see some friends.  It was a good weekend.  I spent my time eating good food and talking with good people, and I'm not really sure you can ask for much more than that.  There was also a great deal of driving.  The Akron/Cleveland area is about seven hours from the Chicago area, not including that tricky time zone which makes the ride either six or eight hours depending on which way you're driving.  Good thing I love driving.

I've written before about how easily I get lost, so maybe me driving doesn't seem like a great idea.  However, the advent of the GPS has done wonders for my ability to get around, and I do my best to keep mine updated and in perfect working order.  My Garmin is almost like a passenger in the car when I'm on a long trip, she gets pleaded with and yelled at, all the while responding in her all-too-pleasant voice that, in some of my less composed moments, causes me to suspect her of sarcasm.

"Are you mocking me, Garmin?"
"Recalculating"
"Damn you!"

But Garmin always gets me through.  I only made one wrong turn this entire trip, and she fixed it within two turns, so I have nothing but gratitude towards her, and my parents for giving her to me last year when I left home.  They were probably worried I'd never find my way back again without her.  What I really love about Garmin, though, is that she takes care of figuring out where I am so I can just focus on driving.

I'm not sure what it is I like about driving so much.  It could be the speed (speed limits or speed suggestions, who's to say?), the sense of freedom that comes with getting out on the highway (I pass signs that say "Exit such-and-such to Wisconsin" or whatever and think "Well I could just go that way if I wanted.  I could go anywhere.").  There is also the fact that driving takes just enough focus to keep my mind off all those things that churn the panic-filled cauldrons in my head, but not enough to engage my mind completely.  I think pleasant thoughts while driving.  Also, I sometimes get good ideas in the car, or come up with the answer to something that's been bothering me.  There were things I was upset about before I took this trip, but the drive gave me the peace and time I needed to think through them.

There is something special, as well, about ending a long trip.  As soon as Garmin says a street I recognize, something hits in the space between my heart and my stomach and I fill up with the word "home".  I get excited and start cutting Garmin off in the middle of her sentences.

"Turn left on..."
"I know!"

And when I pull into my driveway, I feel content.  I feel like I have changed somehow, that the drive has cleared my mind, and that when I wake up in the morning things will be different.  They aren't, of course.  Everything is exactly how I left it a few days ago, but I feel better about it now.  Fifteen hours in a one woman think tank can do wonders.  The people I hung out with in between didn't hurt, either.

So that's where things are right now.  I've come up with some ideas on how to get this life of mine in gear, but I'll wait to see what pans out and what doesn't before going into details.  One thing I will be attempting is to blog more often.  This right here is only my thirty-first entry, and I've been using this blog for over a year.  I'd like for this outlet to be used more often, to be more positive, and not just a place to purge all my negativity.

NOTE: I will definitely still be purging negativity on here, just hopefully not as often.  I have other emotions.  It is time to use them.

This is, in part, why I'm signing up for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge.  Basically, you write one entry a day the entire month of April, excluding the Sundays (except April first is a Sunday, so you include that one), with each entry's theme corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, beginning with "A".  I'm usually not one to sign up for things like this, but I like the idea of having something to drive my writing here, to force me into writing more often.  It also takes the pressure off coming up with topics, since you're limited by the letter of the day.  Writing entries here tends to fuel my writing poetry, and my writing in general has fallen to the wayside over the past couple months, so hopefully this will give me something of a jump start.

It may seem like April is far away, but it isn't.  I know this because my birthday is next Friday and I never saw it coming.  People are asking what my plans are, and I feel incredible pressure to appear social and interesting.  That calm post-drive feeling is already beginning to fade.

This Time Last Year

In all actuality, this time last year is hard to remember.  Maybe it's the stress from everything that was going on, or just some kind of safety mechanism in my brain blocking out how bad I felt, or maybe I just was tired of feeling by then.  Either way, I only remember last December as fact more so than experience.  I remember sitting very still on the couch from my apartment after it had been moved into my parents basement.  I remember sending e-mails to my school and department heads informing them that I was not coming back.  I don't remember Christmas or New Year's, or what family, if any, was in town.

This time last year was the settling of dust after the abrupt collapse of a building four years in the making.  Later I would be forced to pick myself up and reassemble, but for these few weeks last year I was permitted to just lie down and think of nothing.  It was, in retrospect, quite necessary.

It's strange to think that a whole year has gone by since then.  In a way it feels like decades, but at the same time like just yesterday.  I feel like I have so little to show for this year.  All I've done, really, is work retail and write poetry.  Even so, this time last year was a whole human being ago.  Part of the reason I have such a hard time remembering that time is perhaps because the person who went through it doesn't really exist anymore.  There were arguments and explanations, acceptances and refusals, far too many misunderstandings, and encouragements from the least likely of places, all of which effectively killed off the shame of failure.

That's what sticks out the most from back then, trying to deal with the fact that I had, for the first time in my life really, truly failed.  It's still difficult to articulate, especially in the deadly arena of casual smalltalk.
"So, you've graduated, right?"
"Yeah, over a year ago."
"Is that so!  What have you been doing since then?"
"Oh, not much, just pissing my life away.  You see, I thought I was going to pursue an academic career studying religion, but found out that choosing one minute area of research to read about the rest of my life, with absolutely no time to do anything else that might make even remotely happy, made me want to ram my head through my crappy apartment's living room window.  So now I work at the mall."

I've always hated smalltalk.  But the point is, it doesn't bother me anymore.  What happened is what happened, I don't regret it or feel embarrassed by it, I can look back on it with the clarity of distance and "now-I-know-better."

As for the future, I'm not really any more certain about it this year than I was last.  There are some prospects, but I don't want to discuss them too much for fear that they won't pan out, and I'll end up looking like an idiot.  For now I'm content with having spent my holiday season with people I love and haven't seen in a very long time.  I got to talk about common things, like fudge recipes and my cousin's dating lives.  I got to watch the youngest members of my family do the robot and sing Adele.  I got to hear stories, about military life, deceased loved ones, Africa, and crazy neighbors who knock possums off their porch with a frying pan.

In short, it's been a good time, and right now I don't need anything more than that.

Evolution of Self Part Two: Hats

I am still in the process of cleaning out my room.  Obviously I'm not being too intense about it, I just pack up some things or rearrange a bit on my days off from work, and hopefully I'll eventually reach the day where there's no stuff lying on the floor.  Hopefully.

One thing I've realized from my last bought of cleaning is that, for a person that doesn't really wear hats that often, I have a hell of a lot of hats.  So of course, rather than finish up what I should have been doing, I decided to take pictures of myself wearing them, and use them as another excuse to ramble about my life.  If you're wondering why there is a shower head in the upper right corner of each picture, it's because my bathroom had better lighting than my bedroom.  And what matters most when you're taking dorky Myspace-style pictures of yourself is lighting.

What made me sad here was that this hat used to fit on my head.  I was twelve when my grandfather (my father's father) died, and I stole this hat from his house.  It was one of several that he wore out when he was running errands or driving me to school.  We've always lived close to their house so my parents used my grandparents as babysitters until I was old enough to stay at home by myself.  My childhood summers were spent running around their yard, playing with their dog, and learning about things like gospel music, moonshine, and The Price is Right.  Good times.

My uncle died when I was very young, but I didn't really know him very well and I only cried because that's what people do at funerals.  When my grandfather died, I was, for potentially the first time, truly affected by loss.  It was not a slow death.  It was years of gradual cancer growth and decay, a loss of mind and body, the latter years of which are burned into me at the deepest levels.  I wanted something tangible to remember him by, that didn't hold any painful connotations.  So I stole one of his hats.  It doesn't make me think of weight loss or hospital sheets, but of trips to the bakery and the post office, and how he used to tell me that horsepower meant the car was being powered by hundreds of tiny horses that disappeared when you opened the hood.

Through high school I kept the hat in my car and wore it while I was driving, but I didn't take my car to college with me, and I haven't actually worn the hat for years until now.  I really wish it fit.

I took quite a few pictures of this one, trying to find a way to look decent, only to conclude that I just can't pull this hat off.  It's my fathers from his time in the Army.  He was drafted at eighteen to be in the Vietnam War, graduated high school, met and got engaged to my mother within three months, went to Basic Training, got married, then after a short honeymoon spent saying goodbye to family out of state, went to receive his assignment and be deployed.  However, shortly before he was supposed to leave for Vietnam, he was chosen seemingly at random to be sent to Hawaii instead.  Seriously.  He was able to bring his new wife with him, and they spent about two years there living what I understand to have been a pretty great life.

My parents are, in a way, the antithesis of everything the outside world has taught me about relationships.  They met on Christmas Eve (my father was already drafted), got engaged in February, at which point my father went off to training, and they only communicated through letters for the next six months.  As soon as he came back they got married, and my mother honestly had no idea if she'd ever see him again.  Then they randomly went to Hawaii.  Every outside resource I had access to growing up told me that you can't rush into relationships.  You have to make sure you have the "right one" and all that.  Almost every couple I've ever seen get together ends up separated or divorced, no matter how long they've known each other beforehand.  But the two people who raised me threw their lives together on a total crap shoot of a bet, and they're still making it after over forty years.  How does that even happen?

In spite of the overwhelming evidence I've found that most relationships are doomed for failure, I have this ever-present proof that there are at least a few that aren't.

I don't know why I still have this, but American Girl was totally my thing back in the day.  The only books I read were the ones about Samantha.  She was my favorite because, of all the American Girl characters, she looked the most like me.  I had the doll and everything.  This hat came with a computer game my aunt bought me where you could make your own plays with all the franchise girls, set up the staging and move the people around, record their lines, and end up with essentially a short film of your own making.  It was really cool, but I could never get the timing quite right.  People would end up moving while they were still talking and things like that.

When I got to be around Jr. High, I think, is when American Girl really took off as this whole multifaceted beast worming its way into all aspects of young female culture, but by then I was real heavy into anime and had pretty much moved on.  But this was the first stuff that I was really into, that held my imagination and got me thinking and writing.

Don't act like you aren't jealous.  I love Rob Dyrdek and all the stupid crap he puts on TV, the Fantasy Factory in particular, as it involves some fellow Akronites, The Pfaff brothers.  However, that show didn't exist when I got this hat, which is from Rob & Big.  This hat has been worn a grand total of twice, including the time you're looking at right now.  It was something that made me laugh, so I got it during winter break of my freshman year of college, and the only other time I wore it was the day I was moving back into my dorm for the next term.

My freshman year of college was stupid.  I was worried, not so much of being alone, but of people feeling bad for me because they knew I was alone.  Everyone else seemed to be so much more socially active than I was and I didn't want anyone to think there was something wrong with me.  By the middle of the year I was on anti-depressant/anxiety medication.  I depended on stupid, funny things to distract me from my awkward, malfunctioning life.  I still do.

This is the latest installation in a series of attempts to replace The Greatest Hat of All Time.  I don't know if it will work yet, since it not cold enough to test it in real life conditions, but it's been a long search and I really think this might be the one.  Allow me to explain:

This is The Greatest Hat of All Time, and I lost it not too long after this picture was taken.  It was devastating.  I can't even explain what made this hat so great, I just found it in a Kohls one day (it was the only one!), and that was that.  It was warm, soft without being flimsy, plus I think we can all agree that it looked downright awesome.  I was doing a service project my sophomore year during one of the breaks, and it was never seen again.  Ever since, I've been trying to replace it.  Nothing to date even compares.

 This is one of many I tried using in its place.  I bought it from my college's bookstore, though what I really wanted was the matching scarf.  My roommate bought one, but I didn't want to come across as a copycat, plus she said she got it because it looked "Hogwartsy."  This annoyed me because I'm one of the very few who hasn't read all the Harry Potter books.  People are sometimes horrified when they discover this.  It's not that I think there's anything wrong with the series, from what I've read it seems like it's pretty great, actually, I just never connected with the characters for some reason.  I can't explain it.  Believe me, I've been forced so many times to try, and I just can't do it.

Anyway, I ended up with the hat instead of the scarf.  It is not comfortable.

Last picture:

Another hat I only wore twice.  The first time is when it was given to me, by a guy I knew my freshman year of college.  It was his hat, and I found it in his car when he was giving me a ride somewhere or other and put it on.  He said that I looked better in it than he did and told me to keep it.  I did.  This guy was the first guy to be really nice to me.  Like really, really nice.  Unfortunately he had a huge thing for my roommate.  The same one who bought the scarf first.  She never actively did anything to hurt me, in fact she really tried to make me see the good things about myself, but I always felt like I was in second place around her.  Not that she was prettier or smarter, but people always liked her more.

There was a time, I guess, where I was very concerned with whether or not people thought I was "okay."  I've always been a bit of a sociophobe (which Firefox has seen fit to try and correct to "sociopaths"), but when I got to college I really noticed how much time I spent alone and how everyone else seemed to be with other people constantly.  There were probably lots of other people out by themselves all the time, but I never noticed them.  Instead I felt like everyone was looking at me, feeling bad for me, assuming I was freak without any friends.  I did a lot of unnecessary damage to myself during this period of time.

I've managed to get more used to myself since then.  Making friends is a long, slow process for me, and that's just fine, since those few people end up being extremely important.  Also, so long as you aren't out on the streets shouting about how much better your god is than everyone else's, no one really cares what you're up to or gives you a passing thought.  So this bizarre little fear has largely fallen to the wayside.

Don't worry, it's been replaced with a number of other, equally foolish worries.  Work in progress.

Cats and Bugs

It's sad to say goodbye to something you love, even if you're getting something better out of the deal.



This is going to be mostly about cars, and a little about creepy statues. First the cars. Since I was seventeen I've had a 2000 Mercury Cougar, which I always lovingly referred to as "The Coug." A lot of people didn't seem to understand why I called it that, which kind of made me sad, but I was still learning back then that not everyone had brothers as old as mine letting them borrow their old cassette tapes.  Anyway here's The Coug:

Lovely, right?  Well it's gone now.  Over the past few weeks The Coug was acting a little odd, and upon further inspection we discovered a rust problem that would be pretty costly to fix, so my dad decided to trade it in.  Before we left the house the morning we got rid of it, he asked if I would miss my old car.  I said no way!  I didn't even use it during college, and besides, it's just a car!

Fast forward to my actually having to empty it out.  Here's some of what was in there: two umbrellas, price tags from our local grocery store/garage sale Marcs, a JC Penney employee lanyard from my high school job, Winnie the Pooh plush toys my mom put in there to "surprise" me when I left it behind during college, a pink blanket of unknown origins, a Batman kite I bought with my friends one day (senior year of high school, I think) when we decided to go buy kites and fly them on an empty piece of land near our school, an old key chain containing a miniature Russian doll one of my friends brought back from her first trip to Russia and a Hiei from Yuyu Hakusho that I bought back when Hot Topic was the new big thing, and this guy

This gnome has been buckled up in the backseat of my car for almost four years.  My junior year of high school I opened my locker one day to find him peering out at me, and he lived in there until the year ended, at which point I moved him to my car, where he's been until last Monday.  My friends gave him to me for reasons I don't completely recall, but I know it had something to do with the Travelocity roaming gnome.  He was safely fastened until late November of last year, when I slammed on the brakes on my way back to grad school after Thanksgiving break to avoid hitting a dear, and he slid out of the seat onto the floor.  I remember this because it was noisy.  He never got picked up and re-buckled because almost hitting that dear triggered something in me that turned what had up til then been a slow decline into a full downward spiral.

Anyway.

So all of these things sat in my parents garage while we traded in The Coug for something better, and I realized that I was really going to miss my old car.  My dad knew the feeling, as he is very sentimental about vehicles, and talks about all his old cars like they're fine wines or old girlfriends.  He's had about forty-six of them throughout his life (cars, not girlfriends).  Just about every three or four years he gets the itch to look for new ones, making our family perhaps the only example of how leasing can make more sense than buying cars.  According to my mother, there are much worse habits a person can have, and so long as he's not trading wives like he trades cars, she's fine with it.

I doubt I'll ever be like that, but for now here's car number two:

As much as I miss my old car, I definitely love this new one just as much, if not more.  However, due to the fact that the seats in the Volkswagen or, if you have a slight lisp like I do, "Voltzwagen," do not have as deep a dip in them as the seats in the Mercury, they do not hold my little gnome in place.  Now it's sitting in the house and I don't know what to do with it.  It's actually a little bit frightening.

I don't know when it started, but it seems to have some kind of weird weeping statue thing going on.

But back to the car.  It surprised my dad when I picked this one out, but Bugs sort of run in the family.  My grandfather (on my dad's side) owned one from the '70s that lived in his garage until a few years ago when we sold it to a family friend who could restore it.  One of my aunts also had one when she was younger, which she loved very much.  She told me that hers had been named Betsy, and asked if I was going to name mine.

The Coug got its name from a musician, and for now the Beetle is on the same track.  Thanks in part to my mother being a victim of the British Invasion, and to the indie/hipster/whatchamacallits for listening to them continually, I am completely unable to spell the would "beetle" without first typing "beatle" and deleting it.  So more often than not I end up talking about my new VW Beatle.  Does that count as a name?

Either way, I'm excited.  I had a lot of good memories with that old car, but a lot of horrible ones, too.  This new car is just that, new (to me, anyway, it's an '05).  A blank slate of sorts that I have been otherwise unable to obtain.  I'm sure it will fill up with things eventually, but right now it's just empty and clean.  And that's kind of nice.

The Most Important Person I Don't Know

My grandmother, the wife of the grandfather I wrote about last post, died in February, the same month both my brother and I were born.  It was about four months after this death that my mother found out she was pregnant with me, and the timing of this arrival/departure combo is the most singular fact of my existence.

Without going into too much detail, my mother adopted my brother after about six years of struggling with infertility and failing to have a child.  It was her dream, for some reason or another, to have several children, and she continued with treatments for another six years before giving up.  Eight years later, her mother died, and almost immediately afterwards her twenty years of wishing and waiting were over.

She told me once when I was younger that she felt like her mother had given me to her, like maybe some kind of afterlife bargaining had brought me to life.  It made me feel so heavy to think that I might only be alive because someone I never knew had died.  It also made me feel like I mattered very, very much.

I was named after this woman: Heather Arlene.  Heather because of Arlene.  But for owing so much to this Arlene character, I know next to nothing about her.  There aren't a lot of videos or pictures of her, and all I've really ever gathered from what anyone who knew her has to say is that she was pretty much the nicest lady, and an extremely good cook.  If I ask for details, everyone just comes back to that one word Nice.  She was just so very Nice.

Going through my grandfather's house we found Arlene's high school yearbook.  Everyone in her year has a single-word description next to their picture.  They range from preferable traits like Intelligent and Witty, to the rather unfortunate Fleshy (honestly, why did they let that get printed?), and by far my favorite, Unconcerned.  But guess what Arlene has next to her name?  Nice.  Is it possible for someone to be so nice that the word completely takes over everyone's memory of them?

I wish I could be more like this person, whoever she is.  I wish I could be Nice.

Since I tossed all my belief systems into the muck between Yes and No, I don't feel like I owe this person anything anymore.  I'm not sure about afterlives or what sway, if any, our words can have on god, but I know that even if it's true, even if I am Heather because of Arlene, the only way to repay her is to live.  No matter how it came to pass, I am alive, and that is most important thing ever.

Again, without going into too much detail, I didn't always see it this way.

So I want to take this moment to thank Arlene, the nicest person I've never met, for giving my life some value when I couldn't see its worth.  While I've never been worse off financially, and have never felt less successful in my life, everything is so much better now.  I get it.  I'm alive.