It Just Gets Harder

It has been three weeks since my mom passed away.
And it just keeps getting worse, getting more difficult.
I think of a thousand things a day I wish I could tell her; stupid things, little things. How people are at work. The horrible, horrible heat. An Op-Ed in the New York Times. What I had for dinner.
All the things we would talk about everyday. The things that make up your life.
I want to -- and I can't.
I have never felt more alone in my life. I always had my mom on my side and I knew that even when we weren't together, there was someone in the world who loved me. Now, I just don't feel the same way. I know my siblings love me and I love them, but it's not the same. No one loves you so freely or so deeply as your mother. And mine is gone.

Does this ever get easier?

Never ask why

Over the past three weeks my life has changed, irrevocably changed and I am not sure how to function.
My mother, my best friend, my biggest champion and the one person who always loved me no matter how much of a pill I am, passed away on July 26.
It was a shock. She hadn't seemed sick or ill when I was home in May and had only been complaining of a pain in her neck. Though we all begged her to see a doctor, she refused and instead saw a quack chiropractor.
After a month of increasing pain and a few days of altered mental status, she finally let my two youngest brothers take her to the emergency room. They took a CT and saw something awful. I was on a plane the very next morning, not knowing what to expect, but hoping that she would be OK.
I had packed for three days and was home for three weeks.
What she thought was just a pulled muscle was actually a fracture in her spinal cord, due to metastasis in her bones...in her bones, in her liver, in her lung, and in her pancreas where we learned it had all started.
It was the longest week of my life in the hospital before my mom passed away. And that was it.

I want to write more. I want to examine this from every angle, every emotion. I want to rail against God and beat my breast and shriek into the wind. I want to turn back the clock and relive my 32 years with her. But I can't. I can't think too much. It hurts. It hurts in a way that is beyond adjectives, beyond words, beyond mere description. It is a raw, red and bloody hurt that I can't dig into just yet. I hope that in the months to come the rawness will fade and I begin to cope, even just a bit. And begin to pick up the pieces of my life without my mother. Someday.

Right now? I just want my mommy.

Life Changes

For the second time in my life, I'm about to start a job that I will not be embarrassed to say I do. The first job was a short-lived one that, unfortunately, created years of anxiety and self-consciousness after it ended. After that I held jobs that paid the bills (sometimes) but wasn't something you really wanted to talk about at cocktail parties or reunions.
I have not married. I'm not even close. I don't have my own place. I've done a little bit of traveling, but not enough to make up for a really crappy job description. The dream, apart from find Prince Charming who wants to whisk me away to Europe on his private jet stocked with episode of 30 Rock and the Simpsons, is doing something amazing for a living. It's not the same as actually having a life, but it was always something that I thought would sorta make up for it.
For the past 2 1/2 years I've been working for a bookstore, which isn't the worst thing, but having gone to an Ivy League school...ending up in retail is a bit demoralizing. You'd be ringing up someone's purchase of "Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul" and getting in a conversation with a customer.
"So how do you like working here?"
"It's not so bad. Good discounts"
All laugh
"Where did you go to school?"
"Columbia"
Silence.
"Well, at least you're surrounded by books."
And I smile and nod and die a little on the inside.
There's nothing wrong with an honest day's work for a semi-honest day's wage - no matter where you went or didn't go to school. Especially in this economy. Rocket scientists will most likely be pouring us coffee...those of us who are lucky enough to afford to buy coffee and not just make it with used coffee grounds and napkins-as-filters. The next person who helps you at the GAP might have once been a financial adviser. So in the grand scheme of things, working at a book store isn't all that bad.
But it still hurt when I thought about where I assumed I would be at this point in my life.
Thankfully, and in what I'm dubbing a total and complete confluence of luck and a fluke, I'm starting a job on Monday that I'm proud of. Not sure what exactly I'll be doing, but working for a major city orchestra is head and shoulders above anything I've done in the past.
I may not be married, or even close, but finally I won't have heart palpitations the next time someone asks me what I do for a living.

Three Movies That Signal The End

I saw Wall-E this weekend and like everyone else in the known universe, I had my mind blown. The visual, the emotions, the downright frakking adorableness of it all was almost too much to handle.
God Bless you Andrew Stanton!
That being said, I saw some movie trailers before the movie that made me question our right to exist on this planet.

1. Fly Me to the Moon. Not much was made clear about this movie from the trailer other than it's flies...who are part of the great space program and are going to the moon. Wow. Add some flatulence jokes, some fat jokes, and some god-awful "fly" and "bug" puns and you have one craptastic movie.

2. Space Chimps. Continuing the idea that what people really want is animated animals being sent to space, we are given "Space Chimps", from the "homo sapien" who gave us Shrek. I say that homo sapien need watch his back. Again, puns and ill-timed and conceived jokes seem to abound. Did someone replace the Mountain Dew in the writers' room with moron juice? Would seem so.

And, finally, the piece de la resistance:
3. Beverly Hills Chiahuahua. One only needs see the trailer to understand the depth and breadth of my loathing of this movie. Dancing, singing, beheadressed rats are no way to get me to see a movie. I imagine South America rumbling as every single Mayan or Incan whose ever culture they are raping for this abortion of a film rolls over in their grave. I don't like seeing these tiny, nervous, and yippy dogs on the street and I surely do not want to see them on screen. The musical number just helped seal the deal. I would have died a happy person had I never had to see animated dogs singing poorly written verse to music that clearly came out of someone's pot-driven synthesizer session.

I understand that there was a writer's strike earlier this year, but why are we the viewing public being punished?

Really McD's?

So McDonald's has a new breakfast sandwich out there, the southern chicken biscuit breakfast sandwich or something like that.
And the commercial is all about how eating chicken for breakfast is different, hip and cool. It even has some douchebag holding said sandwich, looking at the camera and saying "Here's to non-conformity".
Really?
REALLY?
Non-conformity is eating a chicken sandwich during am hours at a nationwide fast food chain? Man, I have been totally misled my whole life about what non-conformity actually meant.
Cuz....I would have thought it's basically the definition...

Long Term Plans

For over 2 years I've lived in Boston. I arrived here without a goal or a plan or really much of anything. 2 years and many books later, I'm working at Barnes & Noble and still sort of treading water, a term which could be applied to my life over the past 10 years.
I left college not knowing what the hell I wanted to do with myself. I've done a myriad of things since then: worked at a few non profits, helped organized a Holocaust museum, worked at a major corporation for a total of 2 weeks, and a whole bunch of other jobs that basically got me nowhere.
As I have drifted back and forth across the country and back and forth between life aspirations, I have felt increasingly untethered to life, to things, and to people. I watched all my friends get married and procreate as I tried yet again to restart my life. At the age of almost 32 I don't know that I've progressed much during this time.
Whereas in the past I had hopes and dreams of traveling the world, meeting someone with whom I'd have that lifelong love affair everyone else seems to find, finding my voice with the written word...now my dreams and hopes are so much more mundane.
Is it wrong to sell myself so short? Or is it just being realistic? How long do you hold onto such ephemera before you start appearing pathetic or am I already there? Do you settle for just OK or do you continue to try and discover the ultimate?
I don't know anymore if I am capable of reaching beyond just getting through it all week by week with a few pennies in my pocket, the memories of past passions fading faster and faster, and just settling for enjoying the latest book, movie or TV show.
And the funniest part? I am not even so sure when and where it all went so...mediocre.

Surreal

Conductor Lorin Maazel was just on The Colbert Report last night.
And just when you thought it was mind bogging enough that the NY Phil played North Korea...