Oops!… I Did It Again

I forgot about this blog! Thanks to a certain Brit for reminding me. Well, it’s Winter Break now, and much is to be said, and that will come tomorrow. I swear!

A preview of topics to be discussed: my certainly impending career as a romance novelist, my first term at college, Hannukkah with the fam, and more!

Consider this.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

This is a complete, grammatically-correct sentence.

It’s been a while.

To briefly introduce this post, I’ll say this right now: college is difficult. There’s not a math or a science on my schedule, and I still find myself panicking and fretting and tossing and turning. This independence thing is getting to me. I still feel like I’m on vacation, tucked away in an artsy town in Oregon, with full intentions to return next week, because real life beckons like some sort of siren.

But this is real life. This room I am living in is mine, and the people who surround me are my neighbors. I am responsible for myself, or at least, I’m attempting to be. It’s scary when your parents can’t really help you. Mine are eight hours away, by car, and haven’t the means to deposit spending money into my pocket. So I got a job. My dad drove me to the interview, then helped me move in. Then he left. A few hours later, I was informed I had gotten the position. I was excited, and suddenly terrified. It was the first time in a long time that I felt like I truly needed my dad with me.

Life has been simultaneously tortoise and hare. On one hand, I find myself saying, “It’s only been a week?” But then I catch myself in a different conversation: “It’s already been a week!”

My parents call every day. I wonder when that will stop.

DEATH, but different.

I’m dying of the plague. Or something akin to it. Well, I might be exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. I feel awful. And we’re at T-minus 11 days until I blast off for Eugene, so I’m hoping I get better before then.

Life’s been pretty hectic lately. My dad’s been crunching some numbers, and it turns out that he is making almost exactly 10% of what he was making last year, money-wise. So it looks like I’m going to college with no job prospects and an awesome $68.07 in my bank account to last me until who knows when.

Awwwwesome.

Alright, I lied.

…About the not posting again for a while part. Not the death part. I won’t talk about death.

Everywhere I go, I fall in love. Not with people; I fall in love with places. I got to this place, and immediately wrote mental sonnets to its ivy-blanketed walls, epitaphs declaring my adoration for its red bricks and clouded skies.

But that’s how I am everywhere. What I’ve come to realize is that my family’s constant moving has fucked me up for good. That I will never be happy with where I am, regardless of how great it actually is. I will always and forever wish to be somewhere new, somewhere different.

I will never truly be happy with my situation. In short: Thanks, Mom and Dad.

No more death posts for at least two weeks, I promise.

On Saturday, I will be jetting off to the exotic reaches of Connecticut to visit the lovely Zoelle at her fancy-shmancy private school. So I’ll leave y’all on a positive note!

Despite my constant gloom-and-doom writings, I actual have hobbies besides predicting the deaths of everyone around me. For starters, I love to cook.

Today, I made my nine year-old sister delicious, gooey macaroni and cheese, and the dish was such a rousing success that I’ll leave it to you guys to play with while I tour exotic New Haven!

EASY BAKED MAC N’ CHEESE

• Tbs butter
• Tbs flour
• 1/2 cup milk
• Variety of shredded cheeses (I use mozzarella, sharp cheddar, asiago, and provolone, but you could use any combination of cheeses.) (Also, I put in way way too much cheese. This is not a bad thing. Cheese is awesome, and the gooier this dish is, the better.)
• 2 cups cooked pasta (I use campanelle because it’s pretty, but any sort of pasta will do, provided it isn’t a spaghetti-shape)
• Diced tomato/bacon/anything else you want to add in there

1. Melt butter in a small saucepan and stir in the flour. Once they make a paste, add milk. Stir constantly until the mixture starts to thicken, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and add cheeses. Stir. Add tomato/bacon/whatever. Stir.
2. Mix the sauce with the cooked pasta, then pour the mixture in a greased baking dish and bake at 400 degrees for 8 minutes.
3. Please to enjoy.

Well, there you have it. Until September 8th!

~Bailey

What dies inside us while we live.

When I can’t sleep, I eulogize.

I realize that I write to great length about death here, and perhaps it has been clouding my mind of late. Sometimes, it’s all I think about. My mother, helpless to her disease. My grandmother, now even more so. Everyone around me is dying, and each at a different speed. People are withering before me. I can’t stop thinking about death. Not in a “dear God, alert the authorities!” sort of way. Just, in a way that human mortality is very abruptly a part of my life, and when I sleep I bring it with me.

Sometimes the eulogies are humorous, reflecting fondly on the times I did or didn’t spend with someone. Sometimes, they’re heartbreaking. Maybe I loved this person. I don’t always eulogize people who are dead, or even people that I know. Just people. Anyone.

“Melissa Who Checked my bags in Safeway was a wonderful person who will be missed by all.”
“It was Lord Byron’s tireless spirit that drove him on and shaped who he was in life.”
“My grandmother meant the world to me.”

Sometimes my grandmother slips in. Every day, we hear worse news. Everything within her is failing, failing, failing, and she won’t eat, or she can’t.

At night, the eulogies come like clouds, shifting listlessly above my head, the cries of unknown funerals echoing behind words that range from rote to powerful. When I eulogize, I sound like Martin Luther King, Jr. In my head, my voice soars over the hundreds gathered for the beautiful ceremony at which I’m speaking. I am lulled into slumber by the sounds of my winged speeches.

A good eulogy is better than Ambien, sometimes.

Addendum.

My mother had a toothache the other day. Absolutely unrelated to her other health issues. But we had a conversation that went something like this:

 

Me: Maybe try some ice?

Mom: [tries ice] It’s cold!

Me: It’s ice.

Mom: It’s cold.

Me: It’s ice.

 

Harmless enough conversation. But then I embarked upon the first forty pages of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He has essentially the same conversation with his cancer-stricken mother. She is dead by the end of the chapter.

I cried. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to finish the book.

Bird Girl

This was from a Nordstrom ad tucked into the September 2007 issue of Vogue. Done in graphite and Prismacolor colored pencil.

Some may call thee mighty and dreadful.

I’m afraid of dying.

I suppose that’s an incredibly silly thing to say. Of course I’m afraid of dying. Most people are. It’s that vast, unfathomable lack of existence that we can’t wrap our minds around. It’s the very idea that life existed before us and will continue to exist after us, and we have been and will be entirely unaware of the goingson of the world but for a brief span of years when we aren’t (except for some of us, who remain ignorant even during that time). And though most people, if not all, are genetically predisposed to dying, I’m afraid I am moreso than most.

This fear is part phobia, part distrust of my own genetic makeup. I have been living in silent terror, waiting for the day when I find out, like my mother did in her teens, that I have a particularly stubborn breed of cancer growing inside of me. Every little leg pain has been a trip to the doctor. Every muscle spasm, spell of faintness, mild fever, persistant cough. No one is taking any chances in my family. My mom told me once that one of the first things she asked the doctor, once her disease was in remission, was whether or not her children would have anything to worry about. Is it genetic?

“No,” the doctor, now dead, assured her. “It is not genetic.”

And yet, she didn’t believe him then, and we don’t believe him now. Every year, just before my annual check-up, my mother reminds me to inform the kind general practitioner of any random signs that could potentially point to cancer, if squinted at and viewed from a diagonal. And every year, the kind general practitioner explains to me that, no, those are growing pains, or no, my leg hurts because I’ve got a massive plum-hued bruise on it, and perhaps my leg would hurt less if I tried not running into things?, and so on, and so forth.

Death, to me, is not simply a stilled heart or a silenced breath. Death is the inability to live. There is a difference, infinitesimal but important. Death, to me, is not being able to do the things I want because I simply can’t.

In my house, Death is a perennial dinner guest. There is always a seat for him at our table; he always casts a shadow over our conversations, especially so over the past few weeks.

“How was your day?” I ask my mom.

“I was in so much pain,” she tells me. “I couldn’t even get out of bed, except to cook dinner.”

She isn’t lying. She isn’t exaggerrating. She never would about this sort of thing.

And all I can think is, That could be me. Dear God, that could be me.