I went on my first real business trip this past week. Of course, my apartment lost power at 3am the morning of and I missed my original flight. A former friend once recommended Cryptonomicon for long flights, and I'm glad I took it with me as I spent all of Monday in transit. The Atlanta airport has free wireless, as long as you're only using SSH. Which means you can root their servers. I'd say to try it, but that might ruin the bandwidth theft for others.
I similarly slept too late to catch my long-planned trip to NYC this morning. Instead, I bummed around all day. In the spirit of avoiding rote habit, I took a long and new route home tonight through Inman, and what car should I walk by but Phil's Fiero. The lights were on in the church, and I'm sure he wouldn't have minded if I stopped in. I think I'll stick with my plan of having dinner, taking a shower and catching a jazz show with Scooter and Mar.
Last Saturday I met Anna next to the gaudy ornamental fountain on the Commons, for to go to dinner, and on my way there, I met a wicked nice guy from New Bedford, MA named Ian. We had a nice conversation. He's from the armpit of Massachusetts and was kind enough to give me a visual aid for that descriptor I'm hoping he had a good time on his daytrip. Before that, I'd stopped by SH to tireswing and maybe catch Pallo to be filmed for his class project. Instead, I was caught by Laura (who needed a pre-concert haircut) and Feldmeier who was being tracked by a film crew of underaged Harvard film students.
A off-hand conversation at IHOP later that night led to me being volunteered to shoot the women of Star Wars: The Musical Edition for the Eastside Calendar project. Which turned into a protracted photo shoot before the show's call yesterday evening. I had too much equipment to take at once, so on the second run I dropped off the model waiver forms and collected the strobes (they belong to EC). On my way in, I saw a tall, thin girl with stunning long hair. I nearly called out to her, but then I thought to see if it really was my friend Antimony because she'd get a real kick out of Star Wars: The Musical Edition. It was some other girl. I decided to drop the strobes off in SIPB so I could get a burrito at Anna's. Food in hand, I picked up a Tech and caught the elevator back up to W20-5. You know, it's something to read while you wait. I didn't even notice the article on Frostbyte, who passed away on Sunday, because Antimony was smiling at me from that distinctive grey box on the bottom right front page.
You know, reading my friends' obituaries... that's just not cool.
I've had more than enough of this death business. But it won't end in my, or any, lifetime.
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A detour into the trivialities that comprise the days of my life.
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4 comments:
Sorry you missed your flight/trip.
I'm more sorry, of course, that you now have to miss your friends. Having spent this past week in close touch with a lot of very unhappy TEPs (and having the uncanny feeling of losing someone I don't know well but had assumed would always be around), the suckage is fresh over here.
We still got each other and yon Fort!
It's the uncanny feeling that does one in, I think. It's hard to shake the feeling that you'll still run into them, maybe someday.
And then you realise that warm, innocuous sort of denial doesn't respect or do justice to them or their loved ones. Neither does sitting down and crying.
So I generally don't know how to feel after that. Except confused and thankful that most everyone else is still alive or in contact. The internet abhores an information vaccuum.
A few thoughts that got stirred up:
If one believes in an afterlife of some sort, then it is not unreasonable to believe that you might indeed have that future encounter.
Denial doesn't matter at all in the long run. As long as we continue to remember and miss those whom we've lost, we can be confident of doing the right thing. In a sense, there is no way to do a person real justice -- one has to justify one's own existence while one exists (or accept its lack of justification). Its relative meaning or worth is a question for history and for the individuals who cared about you, but it is not a finally answerable question, and the answers obtained will eventually be lost as you pass out of living and historical memory.
Besides, we're all equipped with certain emotional ranges and responses -- there is no wrong way to react to a death, only an uncharacteristic or uncharitable way.
I find all this freeing as much as others might find it depressing.
I think it depends to some extent on the scope of the denial. At one end of the spectrum, an immature refusal to acknowledge as fact what has transpired seems to deny those involved closure on the issue. On the other hand, the "warm, innocuous" flavor doesn't appear to tread on others' ability to come to grips with the situation.
At that point, as Sherv says, it's all a matter of how you're equipped to deal with it, I suppose.
It occurs to me that, in dealing with death, one could do worse than to speak with one's elders. The obvious reasons---they've presumably seen more of it, being older---aside, the necessity of dealing with death was just greater in times past, when life expectancies were shorter (never mind that our parents and grandparents saw a whole lot more warfare than we're likely to see in our lifetimes).
It just might be the case that we, as a society, are going to become worse at dealing with death. *shudder*
-rsw
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