OBLIVION III.6||and bring me to god



TITLE|leaving
Saturday, May 22, 2004
The semester is over, and I'm finally headed home. I hit the road tomorrow morning. Keeping with tradition, I still have a lot of packing to do, not to mention returning the furniture and closet doors in my room to their original states. Ah... procrastination.
I talked with Hans for what felt like the first time in a lifetime. Man, was it good to hear his voice. Apparently group dynamics have once again shifted back home: Hans and Matt are hanging out again, but Chris/Kyle/Zack etc have stopped spending time with Matt. Sounds like it could prove interesting.
There's other stuff to write about since my last entry, but I'm lazy.
I'm really looking forward to the long drive home. Sweet, sweet open road..

See you when I see you.

Reading questions
(1) What is the author leaving unsaid?
Answer thoughtfully and thoroughly. Answers will not be collected, but remember, this will be on the test.

Number Six on the Lunatic Fringe, signing out - 09:32 p.m.


TITLE|twenty.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
For those stalkers who are interested and can speak Japanese, I'm now running a supplementary blog to keep up my Japanese work over the summer or whatever. The entries in the two blogs won't be much related, so I guess it's a bonus for you if you're really that interested. Also, there's a new nonsense journal up on my MySpace account.
I've been getting irritable lately, even with Emily. Especially with Emily, I guess, since I spend more time with her than with anyone else. I think that, although boredom certainly plays a large role in this, it's more symptomatic of a deeper sadness at being separated from my friends for so long. And also important is my frustration with college life in general. I can't date anyone here because it's so small, so there's no romance - this is the first time since eleventh grade that I haven't had a boyfriend/whatever during the spring. And Oberlin's in the middle of nowhere, so the opportunities for adventure are pretty limited.
And, beautiful though math is, I'm getting fed up and bored with the over-complicated language and processes of analysis. I mean, the point of math is ultimately to model reality to aid in our understanding of it. Why develop a model that's just as complicated as and less intuitive than that which it's meant to simplify? Argh.

Oh, yeah. I'm not a teenager anymore. Sorry for not posting a birthday reminder earlier - I've been pretty bad about updating this thing since December. Ah well. It was an okay birthday for coming in the middle of the week before finals. The parents got me a delicious cheesecake.

Why am I so tired all the time? Oh, right, all that not sleeping. Damn. Maybe if I go to bed now I'll be able to wake up rested and refreshed... right.

I wonder why I so often end up friends with people who are enemies with each other. It seems very odd to me, and yet it's happened any number of times now.
Right. Bed.

Reading questions
(1) What is probably the real reason the author has been irritable of late?
(2) What is the author leaving unsaid?
Answer thoughtfully and thoroughly. Answers will not be collected, but remember, this will be on the test.

Number Six on the Lunatic Fringe, signing out - 01:59 a.m.


TITLE|un
Friday, April 30, 2004
Apologies for the sparse updates this month. This one's not gonna be very long, since it's after 4 a.m., but so it goes.
I'm visiting Ham and Emma in Illinois this weekend. I really cannot wait.
Natalie told me that she and Alex are worried about me. Maybe they have reason to be. I dunno.
I haven't been the same since my grandfather's death. I can't focus in any classes. It's especially evident in Japanese, where I'm messing up all over the place.

I think I'll include here the rough draft of my mother's eulogy that she e-mailed me so I could print it out for her.

I've started writing this eulogy five times now. Four false starts, none of them ringing true. I don't know why I'm finding it so hard to write what's in my heart. Perhaps it's just too hard to say goodbye.

But I want to honor my father, and I want to share what he meant to me. But where do I start...

Shall I tell you about the amazing life he led? How he fled Rumania and, after stops in several other countries, found a welcoming home in America? That in the course of his travels, he learned seven languages, and ended up speaking all them, he would tell you with a laugh, with an accent. That he looked back on Rumania, not with bitterness, but with fond memories and great affection.

Shall I tell you about how he proposed to my mother just three weeks after meeting her? And how that was possibly the best decision he ever made. No, I don't need to tell you this, because everyone in this room knows how much my parents loved each other. Fifty five plus years together. Two very strong personalities who were the equal of each other. My mom was so good for my dad. He was hugely proud of her, and depended on her for her common sense, her social skills and her total acceptance of him. My dad loved and cherished my mother with his last breath.

Shall I tell you about his paintings? The ones that captured what he loved in life – his family, his homeland, his neighborhood? Shall I tell you about being a little girl and going out on painting expeditions with my dad, with our easels set up side by side? What about his miniature trains, that ran through villages of his making? One of my favorite photographs is of Dad and his grandson, Michael, wearing conductor hats and grinning at the camera, with the trains in the background. And do you remember the day he decided that it would be fun to build a car, and within months, he and my mom were tooling around town in a bright red vintage Bugatti...

I couldn't let the day go by without telling you about his stories. My sister and I were raised on a variety of cautionary tales that were drummed into us. Did you know that you should never look at a radio tower in a rainstorm, because if lightening hits the tower, you could be blinded? Did you know that you should always avert your gaze when a bottle of champagne is being opened? Because that cork could put out your eye, and you would be... you guess it... blinded! Some of his stories were less cautionary than colorful. For example, I was 45 before I could get myself to eat yogurt, because my father had told me that yogurt is made by pouring goat's milk over camel dung. Mmmm.

While we're on the subject of food, did you know how my dad felt about chicken? Don't even think of serving it to him! He would talk about being a boy, walking across the family yard in Rumania, stepping on decapitated chicken heads, and how he could never eat chicken after that. I remember my mom talking about the horrified look on his face when, on a trip to China, he pulled the chicken foot out of his bowl of soup! For everything he refused to eat – and ask my mother – the list was a long one – he had several dishes he just loved. Joan and I both have fond memories of him mixing raw egg yolk with sugar as a special treat when we were children – please remember this was in the days before we worried about salmonella in eggs! Delicious! And he told with great pride the story of being chased out of restaurant in Paris after insulting the chef, by ordering bananas and cheese for dessert.

On a more serious note, my father was a quiet man, and as he dealt with increasing health issues, he became quieter. I think underneath his strong personality, he was a fundamentally shy person, and he felt most comfortable talking about things he knew – medicine, art, history, music, science. He had a special rapport with my son, Andrew, with whom he shared many interests. One of my best memories was of Andrew talking about his relationship with his grandfather in his confirmation speech.
There was much love between these two.

So that's a little of the personal side of my dad. But the one thing that defined him in this life was that he was a physician, and there as no one better at it. Just listen to what some of his patients wrote when he retired five years ago:

(quotes)

Here's what I learned from my father: Work should be a joy, not a burden. Find something that you can use your God-given talents on, and use that to make a difference in this world. My dad loved being a doctor. He loved the intellectual challenge and the personal relationships he had with his patients. He loved making people better, and helping them cope with their illnesses. And in return, his patients loved him.

Let me leave you with the images I'll always have of my dad. He was a lion. A force to be reckoned with. A man who was bigger than life, and who left his mark on this world. He loved his life, and he loved his family, and he cherished his time on this earth. He squeezed out everything that he could from every day, and expected that everyone around him would do the same. He looked at the world, appreciated its beauty and captured it in his paintings, his book and his stories.

I loved him every day of my life,. He was my inspiration. He was my father, and I'm grateful that he was with us for as long as he was. But I'll miss him forever.

There were two significant changes to this: my mother added the news that Carolyn will be graduating Magna Cum Laude and how proud our grandfather would have been of her and of her academic excellence in general, and she added the story of how my grandfather, in spite of his deep dislike of parties, stayed all through my cousin Amy's bat mitzvah party so he could have a dance with her.

The funeral Wednesday was heartbreaking. And, honestly, exhausting. The service at the synagogue was nice. My mom was somehow able to deliver her eulogy. I wonder if I would be able to speak like that at my father's funeral.
My mother is standing at the lectern, somehow making it through the tears to deliver her eulogy, most of which I have read and heard already. I am sitting at the left end of the family, trying, as I will try throughout the day, to keep it together, to be a rock for my family. Carolyn is next to me, crying in a way I have never seen her cry. Next to her is my father, sitting disconsolate next to my mother's empty seat. My grandmother and Aunt Joan are weeping openly. I look at my aunt, and then at my mother, and I wonder with the starkness of total grief how on earth Martin finds the strength, how he can keep his shit together during such a painful time.
My mother sits down and the rabbi puts on the final movement of Beethoven's final string quartet, as my grandfather requested before his death. I am stunned by the immediacy of my grandfather's presence in the room, but before I even have time to come to terms with this incomparable sensation, we are ushered out of the sanctuary.
The graveside ceremony was next, and it didn't ring at all true to me. It consisted just about entirely of very God-oriented psalms and prayers. Well, that's all very nice, but the fact is that my grandfather was not a terribly religious man. It seemed almost obscenely inappropriate to me.
Staring at the container that housed his ashes, I thought back on the terrible story I had heard only hours before, how my grandmother was required to positively identify my grandfather's empty body before they would cremate it. What a cruel practice! There are so many others who could have identified him. Why must they require his heartbroken widow to undertake such a shattering experience?
Widow. I don't think I've ever described a real person with that word before.
Jewish law mandates that we eat after a funeral: life goes on; we should not be utterly lost in mourning. And so we gathered at my aunt's house to eat a ceremonial meal, and then spent what felt like two hundred years receiving friends and family and the like. It was a delight to meet my grandmother's cousins (a truly charming woman named Clare (sp?) and her husband Stanley, and Clare and Grandma's jackass cousin Tom) and a third cousin once removed (Clare's daughter Patty, who bore an unbelieveably strong resemblance to her mother and was accompanied by her husband) and to see other old relatives and family friends, but as for the hordes of people I had never met... well, my natural response to strangers is to smile and be gracious, but even I felt run through the wringer. It was loud and I had to keep smiling and people were talking to me and there came a point where I just couldn't hear anything they said anymore.
My mother finally used my coughing as a pretense to excuse ourselves, saying we'd better find me some coughdrops. We escaped to a solitary room upstairs. My grandmother came too, followed later by Ellen and her daughter. Ellen and her family visited us back home many years ago, and I cannot remember whether she is family (I think she might be my mother's cousin) or just a very old friend of my mother's. Regardless, she is a very dear woman.
The quiet in the room was amazingly therapeutic. We sat around and I listened to stories of my mother and Aunt Joan and Ellen growing up and generally felt a little better.
I had to get back to school eventually. I bade Carolyn farewell, as she was going back to St. Louis Thursday morning, and said my goodbyes all around, then drove back to Oberlin. It wasn't an easy drive.
On Friday we went to Shabbat services and dinner. I found out that (third cousin once removed) Patty's son had committed suicide just the night before. It really made me thankful for Hans and Jason and Jennella, who have all kept me from putting my parents through that same horrible pain.
Writing about this is making me exhausted, plus it's already late and I've made a liar of myself by writing a pretty long entry. I'm cutting myself off.

Reading questions (1) The author says he hasn't been the same since his grandfather's death. What, specifically, might he mean by this?
(2) The author's grandfather was in declining health since early 2000, when he had to undergo open-heart surgery. The death did not come as a surprise. How do you think this affected the reactions of the author and his family members to the news of the death?
(3) What is the author leaving unsaid?
Answer thoughtfully and thoroughly. Answers will not be collected, but remember, this will be on the test.

Number Six on the Lunatic Fringe, signing out - 05:04 a.m.


TITLE|half the month (plus bad poetry)
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
(start time: 02:23 a.m. Friday, April 16, 2004)
Meltdown.
I got sick when we returned to London that Thursday and I've been sick since. Nothing fatal, just a really bad cough that occasionally leads to blinding headaches, sore throats, and general achiness. It made the rest of the vacation kind of a bummer, tho, and it's not made classes any easier.
Nice April Fool's joke I pulled there, huh, stopping updates for a couple weeks?
I should go move my truck. I'll get back to this.

The Third Sea

The Third Sea: a dreamy wail of stars and space,
illuminated flux of pouring night and waterlight.
The giants navigate its formless surface,
their vast and sleeping arms a muslin storm
to dim the embryonic fires, and,
hours past the heavy affections of midnight,
I find myself swimming again
with glasses on my face.

The sky is burning lilacs.

The marine layer goddess
dances in her tenebrated palace
and whispers, seductive,
omnisonant and immediate;
casts her veils over vacuum beaches;
sleeps burning and alone;

And the sky is sobered sorcerery.

Hours later, the sun
has burned off most of the veils,
and I am standing in the shallows,
bewildered and unrested
and feeling like a jilted bride.

Exhausted in her dusty room,
the restless goddess rinses off old memories
and forgets to water the flowers.

So now, a full four days after I started this entry, I continue it. As always, comments on that thar bad poetry are greatly appreciated.
Things I have learned in the past few days:
-Warioware Megagames for Gamecube is insanely addictive.
-A filled Julia set is the set of all points whose orbits under a given function are bounded. In the complex plane, it is often a very beautiful object.
-I have bronchitis.
-The part of me that wants to be a social worker is much larger than previously suspected.
-I can work for twelve hours (though not consecutively, as far as I know) to try to find the right way to phrase a line in a poem.
-The gel you burn in a fondue set is called Sterno.
-Cold-Eeze doesn't leave a nasty aftertaste if I keep my lips shut until it has completely dissolved. Also, it works much better than any other throat lozenge I've tried.
***...and my grandfather, after years of declining health, has passed away. I'm glad he's free from pain, but I can't stop thinking of my poor grandmother. What can it be like for her?
The funeral is Wednesday. I don't remember ever going to a funeral before, although I might have when I was very young. My nice clothes are back in LA, and my parents can't get to them, so I have to go find something to wear. God, what a stupid thing to have to think about right now.
I want to give a eulogy, but I cannot for the life of me write one out. Writer's block is painful. Especially in this situation.

Other things that happened in the interstices: in Dublin I saw The Burial at Thebes, a translation of Antigone done by an Irish playwright whose name escapes me. The translation work wasn't very good - it mixed old language with new, which made it hard for the actors to make it seem at all natural. Beautifully staged, though.
In London, we went to the V&A museum, which was gorgeous, and also we saw The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which was mostly quite funny although flat at a number of points.
Drag Ball happened. I was feeling way too sick to go, and due to a number of communication mishaps I didn't end up doing a bunch of things I was supposed to do, which I feel pretty bad about. On the plus side, I did Alex's makeup and made him nice and purty, and I helped Meg look stubbly and cool.
I saw a documentary on North Korea and another on a Christian haunted house put on annually by a Pentecostal church (that one was called Hell House and has inspired me to make a musical or TV series or ice-capade based on Chick Tracts), both quite good.
I took two math exams, doing surprisingly well on one and probably bombing the other.

I'm exhausted. My throat is sore and my nose is clogged. I think I'm mildly depressed and majorly homesick. It's really touching how often everyone asks when I'll be coming home. I want to see the whole gang right now. I might be driving out to visit Ham in Illinois in a couple weeks - I really hope that works out; I miss her more than I can say without being unduly cheesy.
I'm rambling. I should end this now. Good night, stalkers, and happy new chapter.

Reading questions
(1) Why did it take the author so long to write this entry?
(2) What can be said about the author's latest poem?
(3) Describe the author's reaction to his grandfather's death.
(4) What is the author leaving unsaid?
Answer thoughtfully and thoroughly. Answers will not be collected, but remember, this will be on the test.

Number Six on the Lunatic Fringe, signing out - 03:16 a.m.
 who||andrew
what||college student with delusions of grandeur
when||twenty years ago
where||oberlin
why||purity.adventure.romance

monarchs
chrysalides

"if you would comfort me
sing me a lullaby
if you would win my heart
sing me a love song
if you would mourn me
and bring me to god
sing me a requiem
sing me to heaven"