highrise living for a joke like me

The snow is coming down so quickly, I don't even have words to describe it. If it were rain, I'd say coming down in buckets. Is this what it's like to live where they have real winters?

Anyway, I've been meaning to do a RL update for a while, so here it is:

( cut for tl;dr )

tl;dr: It was bad. It got better.

It's More Joy Day! Spread some joy.

Today I have to cram a semester's worth of art history back into my head. Eep.

Wound up getting exactly nothing done on Monday, minus the writing year-in-review roundup. Was much more productive yesterday, only to discover that there's something wrong with the plumbing, so the food refuse that had gone down the kitchen sink had come back up the basement slop sink, spraying rotting food all over the inside of the basin and dirty water onto a quantity of floor. I may have had a teeny bit of a freakout, and then called the parentals. Cleaned up the water, moved the waiting-to-be-washed laundry that had gotten wet to a bathtub to rinse out, and Mum called the landlord and the plumber.

And I had to get up at 6:30a to meet the plumber.

He's snaking the drain right now, so hopefully that'll be fixed soon. Then I'm taking a shower and washing everything in the house.

Thank you, world, for feeling the need to push my limits when I'm already shaky. At least I see the doc about replacement meds tomorrow.

And Happy Friday for the rest of us. :)

I come bearing really amusing videos. The first is stolen from sidlj, and the second kashmir_ki_kali introduced me to years ago:

Yeah, so I fail at organizing. I blame Mom, who has been driving me up the wall all day. And the snow, which has prevented me from baking (no butter! oh noes), but I've been promised some from a neighbor if I slog across the street tomorrow.

If you are interested in stopping by to make a shivah call, drop me an e-mail. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, silly goyim drop me an e-mail and I'll try to explain using English words. :P melayneseahawk[at]gmail[dot]com

Stay safe, everyone, especially those of you who are also in the blizzard zone.

Winter. Bah humbug.

I will be out of communication range until Friday night/Saturday morning. There will be updates re: shivah and whatnot then.

Normal activity should resume next week. Thank you for your patience and well-wishes.

My grandmother passed away today at about noon. It was, I am told, relatively painless, and since it came at the end of a long illness and my mother and grandfather were there with her, it could be worse.

A large part of me has been expecting this since Mom flew out Saturday morning, so it feels as if I did my preliminary mourning then (small bout of tears in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation). Now, I just feel kind of hollow, like there should be emotions there that aren't. I'll admit that I was never particularly close to my grandparents (my mother's parents; my father's had both died before I was born), but shouldn't I feel something?

Or maybe it's just that I've cried myself out over the last two years over the minor heartbreaks that come with depression, and I'm empty. Where do you buy refill emotions? Staples, next to the ink cartridges?

I realized, too, that almost all of the strong memories I have of my grandmother are stories I was told about her. I know she rode horses bareback before the war, and once went to the beach and made a bikini out of bandannas because she didn't have a swimsuit. I know that my grandfather went AWOL to marry her so she could get out of Europe after the war, and that while she told him he could divorce her once she was in Canada they just never got around to it. I know the stories of her inability to cook and the time she crammed half a dozen steaks into my mother's tiny med school freezer. But these aren't my memories, and I guess that just adds to the disconnect I'm feeling right now.

The funeral is on Friday (we're bending the three-day rule so that it's not on my brother's birthday) at the funeral plot on Long Island. I'm still taking the exam I have scheduled on Wednesday, because putting it off really isn't going to make that much of a difference, anyway. We're driving up to Frostbite Falls tomorrow to pick up my brother; exact arrangements to bring my mother and grandfather up to New York and for us to meet them are still up in the air. Shivah (kind of like a Jewish wake, except really not) will be at our house starting...after the ceremony, I suppose, but Jewish law doesn't really take interstate travel into account.

I guess that's it, then.

So, my grandmother is dying.

This isn't a surprise. She's a 90+ Holocaust survivor and has some flavor of COPD (likely from what she experienced at Bergen-Belsen, since she's never smoked a cigarette in her life). She's been unwell for a long time, and recently it's been more of a when than if. Mom had actually just been in the process of arranging hospice care for her.

But my mother woke me up this morning to tell me that my grandmother had been vomiting black (sign of gastric bleeding), and now that when is looking to be soon. So we threw some stuff into a suitcase and she flew down to West Palm where my grandparents are.

Leaving me to coordinate phone calls between here, West Palm, Chicago (where Dad is, at a conference), and Mom en route, and I haven't accomplished much since this morning beyond that and reading a lot of mind-numbing fanfic.

And I have finals next week and colleges to be contacting and the Geekling needs to be picked up from Frostbite Falls in a week and I don't think I'm mentally equipped to handle all this right now.

Dear world, fuck off and die, mkay?

So, was woken up this morning by my mother informing me that the furnace was broken*, so now my house's temperature is at 62F and dropping. The HVAC guys are supposed to be coming, but they're dumb and haven't called me yet. I'm currently wearing three layers and camped out in my brother's room, which is the smallest room that is not a bathroom. When I really can't stand it, I have a space heater I can turn on, which will hopefully be enough to keep me a little warmer. Hadn't planned on this. We'll see what happens.

I did, however, have an awesome day yesterday, which, coming on the heels of about a week of remarkably good days, is doing wonders for my mood.

Art hist and music were rather dull, but in American hist I had a presentation, and it went really well. The topic was music during the Vietnam war (anti and pro), and I'd put together a pretty spiffy (if I do say so myself) PowerPoint. To go with said PowerPoint, I'd taken the eight songs I was specifically discussing and snipped them down to just the specific stanza(s) I wanted, which meant I wouldn't have to worry about having to scan through the songs for the exact part. I also had packets with the complete lyrics for each song, which people seemed to actually be looking at. And I got compliments afterward, not just from the prof but from a number of my classmates. I was really, really pleased.

Then I went down to Dupont Circle and met N (formerly of Starbucks), who was passing through DC on her way from Bum-Fuck, Ohio to Miami. We camped out in Teaism and played UpWords, then hung out in Starbucks to talk some more, then wandered around Beadazzled until I had to head out. It was really, really great to see her. Having a social life, even for just a weekend (I got to hang with triannamaxwell on Friday), is really great.

Also, the replacement for the corset I bought at Dragon*Con last year arrived. I think I need to bug Sarah G. to help me make sure it fits, since I think she's the only person I know in the state that knows how to lace it properly. But, it's here, and that makes me gleeful.

My mood has been better since the beginning of last week, much closer to what it should be. I'm still worried that it's a fluke, or that it will go away once my metabolism has caught up with the current meds configuration, but it makes me optimistic that I actually will be ready to go back to school next fall.

Speaking of, I need to start making those phone calls to the various programs. Eep.

*Actually, my brain had already begun the slow crawl toward consciousness, with the thought of Dude, is it cold in here? And yes, my half-awake mind says "dude". I imagine it as a tiny, pot-smoking surfer-boy, which doesn't make any sense. Don't ask, I don't even know.

Am pissed because today's matinee was cancelled, but not until I was already here. So, I've been sitting in the box office since 1pm, then they let me out to have dinner with the cast at 5 and we have another show at 8pm. Honestly, I can't say I'd have accomplished any more if I'd been at home, but at least then I'd have free access to a bathroom. :(

I'm kind of amazed that it's already less than a week until Thanksgiving. Where does the time go? Thanksgiving, btw, is going to suck; Mom's inviting the neighbors over again, which means very little food I eat plus the extreme discomfort of trying to talk to people with whom I have absolutely nothing in common. But, of course, I'm not allowed to skip out to work at a soup kitchen or something because Thanksgiving is a family event (then why are we having it with the neighbors?) and I have no right to tell my mother who she can or can't be friends with. It's weird; Dad treats me with kid gloves when he thinks I'm in a situation that might upset me, Mom seems to like pushing me until I break down in tears. So much for maternal instinct.

(They're both driving me crazy. I've been trying to treat the situation as three adult roommates sharing a house, but at this point housework only gets done when I do it and I'm partially or solely responsible for making dinner most nights. Yes, I understand that they both have full-time jobs, but it's not like I'm spending my time sitting around scratching my ass.)

Wow, that was much more ranty than I'd thought it would be...