fox

I am feeling better and calmer and less hysterical now; but my brother tells me he heard from my friend's brother (we met on the first day of kindergarten, which means the boys have been friends since they were two) that their mom died this morning.

There will be a drive to Cleveland in my near future.

The mother of my very first school friend - we met on the first day of kindergarten - is dying of ovarian cancer. She's out of the hospital and home in hospice. This was the first I heard she's even been sick; my friend has never been the most consistent correspondent, and now one knows why that's been particularly true lately.

Focusing is hard tonight.

Teammate K's grandmother died last night. He's pretty shook up. We are (a) full of sympathy and (b) scrambling madly to try to find a new lead.

New girl is about to be discharged from the hospital -- she sounds ten thousand times better.  It's like you can hear that the color is back in her face, and she's in control of her voice and so on -- she still doesn't remember falling or the rest of Friday night or most of yesterday, but otherwise the short-term memory is back, she says; you tell her something and three minutes later she will still remember it.  I'm sure my relief is nothing to hers, but nevertheless.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess we'll be needing a new teammate, though.

Et tu, Maryland?

(The Maryland Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court's decision finding that the state law limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples is unconstitutional.  There is still hope that the legislature will repeal it, I suppose, but for now the law stands.)

Last week, a lady from my choir who'd been very sick for a relatively short time passed away; she was well-loved by many people in the group.  And of course today the eljay has been full of people missing the late thamiris.

Same situation, really.  I never knew either of them, but I'm very sorry for everybody I know who has just lost a friend.

I sang at a memorial service on Thursday, with a group comprised of members of The Big Choir that I'm in.  The service was for a woman who had been a member of that choir for more than 40 years, and died last month, after a struggle with cancer, at the age of 83.  Of course it was very sad -- and I was surprised, actually, by how sad I found it, given that I never knew her and didn't know anyone in the room apart from about 1/3 of the choir members doing the singing -- but at the same time, 83, man.  All people kept talking about was how full a life she'd led.

Today, the B-team choir sang at a memorial service for a woman who died in January, also after a struggle with cancer, at the age of 37, leaving (among others) two very small children.  And that -- is just not okay.  The speakers were, in speaking order, a childhood friend; her thesis supervisor; her husband; and her father.  When her husband got up to speak, he had the two little kids with him -- the baby girl, maybe a year and a half (certainly no more than that) was on his shoulders, and the little boy, about four, was on his hip, and kept trying to play with the microphone on the lectern.  Again:  complete strangers, but my god, you try keeping it together through that.  Man, all the way up at the top of the list of things that ain't right.

doesn't need explaining, does it?

I'm vaguely sad -- not about my own course, but about the fact that other people are unhappy in theirs. I must admit that my vicarious sadness is due partly to the worry that people I like might quit school and leave me, and then I'd be short two friends more than I'd already have been given the fact that a percentage of my friends in college are here on one-year courses. I'm not entirely unselfish about this.

But the thing is, I've been unhappy before at the prospect of people leaving grad school before they were done, and they weren't in school with me in the first place, so leaving school didn't equate to going away from where they could be my local friends. I find it sort of depressing when a dissertation doesn't get finished. (I feel the same way about bachelor's degrees, now that I think about it.) In some part of my mind or my heart, I feel disappointment on behalf of the student, as if s/he had wanted this thing and worked so hard for it and then given up in the middle of the home stretch.

Hi. I'm Fox. I project. Nice to meet you. :-]

In passing, I'll note that this is the main reason I have never -- I mean, never, y'all -- been able to watch "The Sentinel, by Blair Sandburg" all the way through.

I know a number of things perfectly well, two of which follow:

that in many, if not most, cases of not finishing a graduate degree, it's not that the student gives up on something s/he still wants at all; instead, people tend to reach places where they realize they want different things than they wanted previously; and

that very few, if any, people -- least of all me -- are harmed by the non-finishing of someone else's degree, so it's actually none of my [damned] business if or why such degrees don't get finished.

Partly, I suppose, I want what's important to me to be important to other people besides me. (In the abstract, I mean. I don't want or expect other people to be consumed by linguistics. But I'm sure there's some level at which I want people to agree with me that an advanced degree is worth having and worth striving for and worth not giving up; but see above re giving up.) Again with the lack of unselfishness.

[eta: In the current instances, I'm also feeling sad that people I like are evidently having such difficulty with their courses at the same time that I'm not having much difficulty yet with mine. I identify this as good old-fashioned Liberal Guilt, but it's harder to assuage than the ordinary kind. If I had cash in my pocket and people I knew were hard up, I'd [at least offer to] buy them a sandwich. If I had the means to fund something worthy like textbooks in city schools, I'd write a check and also give of my spare time, if I had any, to make it happen. But there's nothing I can do to level out the degree of ease with which people are dealing with their schoolwork, and it makes me feel unhappy and guilty. The guilt is misplaced -- it's not my fault someone else's course is difficult (although it is to some degree my fault that mine is easy, since I've had all this before) -- but it's there all the same.]

I have learned, over the years, not to try to talk people into staying. I've learned, I mean to say, that when people ask me what I think, I've learned how to separate what I would do from what I think they should do (from what I think they want to hear [g], though I usually share both the second and the third of these). I've learned that the impulse to talk people into staying tends to come from my own feelings about what I'd want, which is neither helpful nor called for.

But I can't really get rid of the sympathetic distress. Even if the people abandoning their degrees aren't distressed or even particularly sorry, and don't need or even want my sympathy. I don't feel this way when unhealthy marriages end in divorce (though I do feel sorry -- less viscerally so, for some reason -- that the marriage was or became unhealthy, I don't feel sorry when it ends); why should I feel this way when unhealthy graduate programs end in the boneyard?

hey, ellen_fremedon.

them: because i know it matters a great deal to all of you, i now report that my friend's mother informs us they were mistaken about the ages of the children in yesterday's messages. anastasia was born 1996; valentina, 1997; katerina, 1998; and sergei, 1999. (they've been at the orphanage apparently since 2001, poor lambs.) it's a good thing we got that all straightened out. :-)

me: thank you all for your sympathy in the wake of georgetown's decision. i'm actually far less upset about it than i would have predicted, which means one of two things: that i'm utterly exhausted, or that it was the right choice for them to make. i want the phd, but i don't feel like oh my god what will i do now if i don't get it, which is a decent place to be. so, it's a disappointment -- i'd have liked them to say we love you, baby. come home -- but not a disaster. plus, my three applications to the british universities are still out there. cambridge and edinburgh both required me to submit passport photos with the applications, so i suppose i should pin all my hopes on oxford, where they aren't equipped to reject me for being funny-looking.

leaving work in one hour to go curling! curling yay!