The Second Week

It it just me, or has everyone been talking about death recently?

I think just about every conversation I've partaken in recently has in some way referenced a sick, dying, or dead person. Some are ones in my own sphere: my grandmother, Jessie's grandmother, etc... while others are just amorphous relations, co-workers and the like. This guy fell out of a tree. This one is in the hospital. This one had to choose whether to live or die. Mat and I saw a woman get hit by a car on Saturday. She fell so close to Mat's car it's a miracle she didn't hit her head off of our fender. I thought of the tarot, how Death means change, and I wondered if the twisting seasons brought out the morbid side of everyone.

It's just a little darker at night, people. And the sun comes back.

I'm feeling strangely silent of late. When things are going well, there's not much to be said, and things are going well for me. I'm doing a good job at my new position. I am well-suited for the kinds of work they have me doing so far - it's a lot (and I mean a LOT) of asset-management and organization, which in my life I'm merely "meh." On a computer, however, I can make a folder with the best of them, and I've nearly mastered the art of alt-tabbing out of GChat in time for the VP to walk by. (I'm super excited about getting a new, smaller desk tomorrow that I can turn around so my back is no longer to the hallway, my computer screen exposed. I'm like a jumpy critter at work, squirreling away my conversations at a footstep or creak.)

It was only on Sunday morning, as I was puking up my stomach lining, that I reconsidered the amount I drank on Saturday night at the Halloween Party hosted by Tooch and Jeep. The party was so much fun, as all of their parties are, and from what I remember I had an excellent time. I was trying to figure out which made me sick: the quantity or the variety. I haven't handled vodka well since I OD'd on it in Florida seven years ago, and I had that, beer, and some kind of mulled wine which God did not intend to be chugged (think thick, cinnamon-y apple cider). On Sunday night, still sick, I wondered about whether I had hit that point when your body loses the will to put up with your poisons and gives you hell in order to change your behavior, but I seriously think the mulled wine is a more likely culprit.

It was good to come home this weekend, though it's a bittersweet experience now. The trips are such whirlwinds that you don't get to really experience anyone for a satisfying amount of time, and part of you expects people to drop everything and throw a parade that you've decided to grace them with your presence. Jess and I used to lament how people expected us to have no life of our own when they came home, and here I found myself wishing for the same thing. I'm home! Didn't you miss me? How did your world revolve without me in it? The truth of course is that it's only the first few days apart that feel long, and the rest jumble together until, when you reunite, it seems no time has passed at all.

On Sunday I had lunch with someone I hadn't seen in seven years. He was the only person I'd ever gotten mad enough at to sever all ties and communication, and seeing him was a nearly out-of-body experience, like I was watching us talking as opposed to actually being there. The answer to the question "How have you been?" contained things like, "Well, after high-school I went to Florida and got a degree, and then I came back and got a Bachelor's at Pitt." Usually that question has something to do with groceries and chores or the events of the day, but in this context we were talking about four-year chunks of life that had passed. It's kind of scary, frankly, that you can update someone on yourself with such brevity, compressing seven years into seven minutes with nary a blink. I felt very big and very small at the same. But it was a good meeting. A healing. I was proud of myself for calling him up.

I wish I had faster fingers. There are so many little moments I want to preserve here, and the thought of documenting them all is dreamy and exhausting. In the interests of science, I've found a way to blog from work. I know some of you just groaned, but I find anything that is wrong and subversive to be highly arousing. No one would know I'm blogging. They'd just see a typing man, looking intent upon making sense of out something, which is what they want to see. It's no different than what I do all day, frankly, save that the job of being wholly myself involves significantly less list-making. We shall see...

Your,
Martin