Hair

This weekend my brother is getting married and among all the craziness that is the end of the semester, I've neglected to think much about what I'll do with my unruly mane come Saturday morning. Guess I better start throwing around some ideas.

Le Festin

Watching Ratatouille for the third time in two days.
No better movie to do homework to.

Let's Rip It Up

I can't remember which blog I found this through, but I think if dancing really came back, maybe I wouldn't need to go to the gym anymore.

Shades

Mourning the loss of Tyler's new sunglasses. He only bought them a week ago and someone sat on them. Here's an old photo of them, as sported by Chevy Chase in the grocery line.

nerdboyfriend.com

Keys

Birthday Blues

This has not been such a fun birthday week so far. I'm feeling stressed out and burned out on my internship and school. I'm so ready for it to be summer so that I can really get going on my thesis and other projects I've been itching to work on.

I should've mentioned to the people making my life difficult this week that tomorrow is my birthday. Maybe then those certain people would have eased up on me and quit their negativity. Or maybe not.

Either way, I'm ready to get away from them and spend time with my family and friends the rest of this week.

Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts...

A Laugh

Grief in Magical Thinking

I'm reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking for my online literature class. I wish I had read it when Grandpa or Aunt Arlene died last year. Didion explains different episodes of how she grieved over the sudden death of her husband and how she relied on literature to help her to make sense of what happened. These are a few of my favorite passages she cites:


I remember her saying that she would stay the night, but I said no, I would be fine alone.

And I was.

Until the morning. When, only half awake, I tried to think why I was alone in the bed. There was a leaden feeling. It was the same leaden feeling with which I woke on mornings after John and I had fought. Had we had a fight? What about, how had it started, how could we fix it if I could not remember how it started?

Then I remembered.

For several weeks that would be the way I woke to the day.

"I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." (A line of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry)
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Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate. Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost. Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response. They searched. They stopped eating. They forgot to breathe. They grew faint from lowered oxygen, they clogged their sinuses with unshed tears and ended up in otolaryngologists' offices with obscure ear infections.
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And a passage from Emily Post's 1922 book of etiquette, Chapter XXIV "Funerals":
Persons under the shock of genuine affliction are not only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, sleepless. Persons they normally like, they often turn from. No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely. Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already at the threatening point, and none have the right to feel hurt if they are told they can neither be of use or be received. At such a time, to some people companionship is a comfort, others shrink from their dearest friends.