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After a strange and tumultuous year, I moved to birdsandfishes.wordpress.com. I hope to see you there, bring your friends.
: )
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This is my new life, the one without you in it. I cannot be sad because I haven’t lost something. It’s simply that, in this part of the story of me, you are mostly memory.
This is not something I have ever imagined for myself. But I suppose that is how it goes.
I could not sleep last night.
I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist or a specialist or an expert on anything. I don’t know who is going to hire me for what I know. it doesn’t seem valuable to anyone but me and other people who are dealing with cancer. I feel like I am being robbed of the moment in my life when my father and I actually get along. When i am getting married, maybe, and we are dancing and he finally relents and recognizes that I am not all bad, that I will be alright, that maybe he should have wasted less time yelling and worrying and more time… talking. Don’t you think we all wish we had spent more time talking? I wish I had more memories of that. Of talking like people.
Lately all I’ve been thinking about is letting go. I’ve been thinking about the way it is key to getting anything back. I’ve been thinking about how so few people are good at it, my sister especially. She needs to control things, to feel like she is doing something obviously good and righteous. She is just like my parents. Things are plain to them. The world is informed by dollar signs. Happiness is informed the same way. I’ve never been so exhausted and sleepless. My muscles are always working. I almost went for a run today. I am restless. I hate running.
I can’t sleep. Last night I was wired until four a.m. when I took a benadryl. I sat on the couch with my father when I first got home and he said “did i tell you the doctor told me he can’t cure me? we’ll do this round and then see what happens.”
What am I supposed to do? I feel restless and wired. I feel like i can’t breathe. Nothing is calming me down. Nobody has changed. Is the secret to surviving cancer admitting that you’re wrong? Expecting that you’re going to die? Changing everything about yourself to something else? I don’t mean to privilege my experience. But it’s something you don’t understand unless you have gone through the tunnel alone. There are people around you but in the end it is an ultimately alienating experience. And my sister with her dumb face just filling with tears, I dont know what to do about it, and i feel so bad, but how can you explain it to her? You disgust me, she said to me once, using cancer as a crutch. My sister and I don’t see eye to eye. I have this constant urge to destroy all of her things just to teach her a lesson. She thinks I am just selfish. Things are so much more complicated than she wants to think they are. People try to simplify things into either right or wrong so that they never have to admit to being wrong 50% of the time.
I am not being very articulate right now. Save for my frustration, which is visceral, and making it very hard for me to breathe. It’s also hot in my airless room. I am taking another benadryl because i’m afraid I won’t be able to sleep otherwise. I am trying to not be affected by watching my father slowly ebb away. I have been trying all year. It’s not working. It hasn’t been working.
I am trying to pin down my frustrations, to make them more manageable. It is hard watching a loved one suffer through cancer. It is harder than cancer because there is the most utter level of helplessness. At least when I had it I could grit my teeth together and pretend to be strong and cry every day for my eleven year old body that was riddled with chemo. But now i can’t cry and i can’t do anything to fix it and everybody just runs around throwing up their hands, freaking out, trying to be helpful. My mother is remarkably strong in the most silent way. I think I have a little of this. Or I’ve sharpened it. I am extremely private about things to certain people. But I do believe in openness. I believe it can save our lives.
I am not ungrateful, for the record. I just want to scream at him sometimes and say When will you stop being scared for me? But I think it is an innate part of parenthood, to be scared for someone else, constantly. I am so upset that my nose is stuffed that I can’t stop letting tears fall out of my eyes. I hate allergies.
I am imagining my conversation with his doctor. I want to say I need you to help me out, doc, I need you to give me some answers. But no one has answers. Is someone trying to tell me something? Anyone?
This was probably too personal to publish in public, but honestly, nobody is going to read it.
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I got my diploma yesterday. I graduated May 17th, but forgot to do my exit counseling! So after nervously shaking hands with old professors in hogwarts garb and shuffling across a stage in the student union all the while being examined close-up by video cameras, I sat down and opened the impressive crimson holder to see a sheet of paper that said something along the lines of “whoops! you forgot to do your exit counseling. we’re holding your diploma hostage until this important life step is finished.” And then I had that sinking feeling you get when you remember you forgot something little but important, and then i almost started laughing because of course I would forget to do something, of course of course. Afterwards, taking pictures with my family, they were all “let me see, let me see!” and I said, now, don’t be mad, buttttt… And my mother said, I’m not surprised.
So yesterday I went to the financial aid office after trying to do this counseling online and failing several times due to pin numbers, lost accounts and what have you, it took all of twelve minutes to complete. Then I went to a desk where a nervous manboy with a beard said he would try to find my diploma. He sought help from a more experienced nervous boy and then, together, they returned with this sheet of naked, unprotected paper that is the sole representation of the last four years of my life. Congratulations! the more experienced nervous boy said and handed me a plain white envelope with my expensive education inside.
I have trouble negotiating spatial relations. Last night John was telling me a story about this dog his friend has who doesn’t believe things are quite where they are. After climbing into your lap the dog continues to try to climb all the way up you, even though there’s nowhere left to go; when called from upstairs he can’t figure out how to get around the massive couches toward the voice he hears and recognizes. I know I am not that dumb, but I was standing there holding the diploma envelope that would not fit in my messenger bag and trying to figure out how to carry it with me while riding my bike and not bending the paper. I tried to ride with it tucked under one arm but almost immediately fell over, and then ended up walking with this thing in one hand and leading my bike along with another. I felt like I was secretly in my graduation robe and in some kind of procession all the way back to the house I now live in. It was strange.
I think the sun is trying to come out even though it is supposed to be setting. I am fine here when it is sunny. I am more than happy to bask in this postgraduate limbo, not planning my future and scheming menial jobs to have enough money for drinking and eating. I went to sleep after five this morning and tried to wake up before noon, but failed and went back to sleep until 3. My day is only starting! My life has just begun! It’s freezing out though, I think boston’s trying to ask me to leave.
New york is my home anyway.
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I am writing because I am tired. Because I’ve spent this week in the library buried under books and can hardly breathe, and I’ve been meeting with old friends who are now strangers and feeling nauseuous. I need a way out of my own head, this seems to be the proper place for that.
From somewhere above me an electric guitar is cooing, and I can hear furniture shifting and footsteps. My apartment is finally warm again, the heat is clanking and the tip of my nose doesn’t get cold at night anymore. Boston isn’t such a bad city when there is working heat and hot water. My eyes are closing. It is almost midnight. Today I returned raphael’s books to him, that I’ve had since he brought them to me in march when I had a cold. There were a lot of them. We chatted awkwardly, he explained the economic crisis to me, I pretended to listen. This week has just been full of terrible revelations. Not revelations so much as the finishing of circles that should have been finished a long time ago. Justin indirectly called me a cunt for keeping things from him, and then I decided that our friendship was clearly unable to thrive in the vast shadow of his pride and pansy ways. I have a habit of trying to make things work that will never, and I don’t know exactly where this comes from. I assume it comes from my overwhelming need to make things right with people, to make people who aren’t well better, and to try to be good. And there comes a point where it’s just not worth it. I came home to tara and spewed all of the things that had been laid like led on me and she said dude, no way. There is no way that could ever be worth it. And she’s right.
Riding my bike home tonight was kind of like flying. Even though it was freezing, and my eyes were glassing over with tears from the cold, it was like being carried to my door. I feel like concluding things was a step forward and it has given me energy, despite how tired tired I am. When tomorrow is finally over I am going to come home and sleep hard, finally, for a long long time.
http://womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com/
Why is it that anyone would think putting Sarah Palin second to the commander in chief was ever a good idea? In what sick way is that true? Alaska, the 47th most popular state, is not even attached by geography to our country. For the first week of her nomination I couldn’t stop calling her Ann Coulter, I would say Ann- Ann, Ann, What is her name? If it isn’t clear to this entire nation that her nomination was based solely on what aspect of the demographic McCain needed to win over with some concoction of image-based iconicity, then I don’t know what is.
I am sitting here munching on a newly purchased box of white cheddar cheez-its, which I bought in a freedom filled fervor at Johnny’s as I could not find the measuring cups needed for cupcake-making. I’m currently typing with one hand since the other is covered in fake-cheddar goodness. This is among the most glorious moments in my life, though I suppose I have many of these, considering I hardly ever think I’m going to pass my classes but in the end I always do. I love how, after eating cheez-its and cheez-it-like-things, I never feel like I’ve eaten them so much as I feel like I’ve rubbed them all over my face.
I think, if I’ve learned anything after completing three years at this immense and bureaucratic institution, it is that this is totally worth it.
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I’m beginning my paper now. “You’re a brave soul,” Trevor said. But how else do you feel alive? Sometimes it feels like school is a joke. And I am the only one laughing, or something, it’s the most expensive joke I’ve ever heard. What was I thinking? That I could do this without looking back? The thing about fear is that once you let it get you, you end up putting yourself in the way of more dangers. So we should be like arrows or daggers, only looking forward, and never looking back.
Anything that has to do with my body, I automatically assume is unstable, and why would I subject myself to something that is bound to change or go away? It’s not that I can’t deal with change, it’s just that usually change equates to “morph into uncontrollable, unrecognizable tragedy,” and these things must be handled with swift termination.
The rational part of my mind is screaming: “Sandy, everything is not a cancer!” and everything else in my head spits back: “But you can’t prove that!”
This is me, trying to get over that, convincing myself maybe you can help.
I get sick about once a year. It is always my fault. There is no real reason for me to get sick, I have a strong immune system, generally healthy eating habits. But I always end up doing stupid shit on nights I should not do stupid shit, and then by the next night I am all curled up in my bed shivering and sweating and cursing myself and my own bad ideas. Or rather, my willingness to participate in bad ideas that are not necessarily my own. This bug stayed in my chest for twenty-four hours, and I am still coughing it up. I think there’s something healing about comic books, I think they should be prescribed regularly, specifically Calvin and Hobbes. I think I am better enough, though, for my professors to believe I was faking, so I am understandably terrified to attend class tomorrow. I was really sick this time! I don’t know what else to say, my professor is too far up in the clouds of academia to understand a common human illness, known also as lethargy, coupled by complete confusion of a poorly laid-out course structure.
But in general, my insides hurt. The bug has moved out from my chest and into my face and lower abdomen. I should have emailed my professors sooner, gone to the career services office, not lied to my mother… Well, I am watching a news program about creationist museum tours. I imagine my CCD teachers dragging us all up and down the museum of natural history to tell us, see all those scientists? They were wrong! This dinosaur ate apples, and only apples, until Eve came along. Then he ate people. Get it?
I should go to bed. Or maybe I shouldn’t. I want my teachers to believe me when I say I’ve felt like death for the last two days. Unfortunately I’m about 80% better than I was then. Perhaps I will shower, and then sleep. I like that funny, electrified look it gives my hair in the morning.
