Well, living in a Dickensian novel as I do, you won\u2019t be surprised to learn a family friend who was about my father\u2019s age committed suicide since we last talked.\u00a0\u00a0 Guess why.\u00a0 Guuuuuuuessssssss.<\/p>\n
Did you say Degenerative Incurable Brain Disease?\u00a0 Well then, ten points to Gryffindor.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s ghastly, ghastly business to watch the fallout.\u00a0 My mom is taking it particularly hard, which I guess is no surprise.\u00a0 (If you’ve been gone a while, my dad has some sort of progressive dementia that’s begun in the past few years.\u00a0 Maybe I’m the only one in my family who considered he might end his life before it took over.\u00a0 Having someone close to us do it is like a\u00a0 terrifying dry-run at what it might be like.)\u00a0 The grief of this person\u2019s family is so convoluted as to be incomprehensible.<\/p>\n
Since it happened, my Dad\u2019s been emailing me regularly, all these profoundly kind emails.\u00a0 He also confessed he hadn\u2019t looked at The Cool Thing because he was afraid he wouldn\u2019t like it, and wouldn\u2019t know what to say.\u00a0 I\u2019d known he hadn\u2019t looked at it because he’s never looked at any of my important stuff.\u00a0 It hurt to hear the reasons, like his\u00a0 fear what I\u2019d done would be \u2018too girly\u2019 or \u2018uninteresting\u2019.\u00a0 Anyway, he wrote to say he\u2019d taken the risk and looked at TCT, and it made him cry, he was so proud.<\/p>\n
And BOOM I was back in high school, full of rage that my father has such a low opinion of who I am, brought to my knees tearful from the unexpected praise, and furious with myself that I care.\u00a0 I was baffled as to how to respond, only thinking how probably he wouldn\u2019t think I\u2019m such a girly idiot<\/em> if I didn\u2019t cry. \u00a0every. time. he said something nice to me.\u00a0 Great job, there, Anne.\u00a0 And sheeeit…\u00a0 I am thirty eight years old.\u00a0 When\u00a0 do I grow out of this?<\/p>\n **<\/p>\n (This should probably be another post, but writing here has become the wild shore leave of my button down, non-creative existence. Plus, it seems like every time I get up the nerve to post, I end up crying. That appears to be slowly but surely freaking the fuck out my husband.\u00a0 Wheee.)<\/p>\n In other news, I think I\u2019m finally coping OK with The Cool Thing.\u00a0 For a while, I was swimming in nebulous goo of not knowing which end was up.\u00a0 With (finally) some distance on it, the best description I can come up with is that it feels like being the first girl in junior high who gets boobs.\u00a0\u00a0 Now there is this inordinate eyeballing of my existence, and various weird reactions.\u00a0 Part of me is now up for public consumption, for talking at instead of talking to, for objectifying.\u00a0 It\u2019s not so much that it is good or bad (although there have been moments of both) only that it\u2019s exhausting and unnerving in its oddness.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an artistic recreation, in the event you didn\u2019t have big boobs in junior high.<\/p>\n