Hello, again. I’m still alive, just barely. It’s embarrassing just how many times I’ve typed some variation of this phrase in the history of this blog, and yet, here it is again.
A summary: I finished grad school in June (just barely), moved out of my apartment and threw everything I own into storage, traveled the country and this continent for most of the summer, and returned to live at home for a teensy bit this fall (and for the first time in 8 years) while I elbow my way back into the workforce. I spend a lot of time playing with my 17-month-old niece. I water plants. I write cover letters. I obsessively read Nate Silver’s blog and worry about the upcoming election. I find ways to watch series three of Downton Abbey as it airs in the UK.
There are a lot of unknowns in my future, both the short-term and the longterm. I’m starting to worry about money in ways I haven’t in many years. I haven’t slept in my own bed in two months. Yeah, things have changed, but in some of the most predictable, Drea-like ways known to humankind. Despite the anxiety, I’m pretty happy.
Friends, this is my sixth and final post of 2011. I could say that I am a terrible blogger, but I’m not sure I was ever really a blogger in any consistent sense of the word. I can’t make any promises for the new year, just that I’ll try to remember this blog is here and that a small smattering of you are kind enough to stop by from time to time.
What a year, eh? December has been hard, not only because it was our first holiday season without Dad, but because I’ve been overwhelmed thinking about everything that’s happened in the last twelve months. Three grandbabies were born. Three! What would we have done without them this Christmas? Probably sat around arguing and been one big lump of sadness, that’s what. I am convinced that the universe timed their births for this year so that we’d have little people to take the sting out of Dad leaving this world so soon, too soon.
My first year of grad school was hard, but in a good way. I often say that it felt like one continuous punch in the face. I learned how much I didn’t know, how much I had yet to learn, how hard this writing thing really is, and how glad I am to have this opportunity to grow as an artist and as a person. This year I started teaching and untangled the mess that would become my thesis. I found some peace in knowing that I’m not here to immediately publish some New York Times Bestseller. I’m here to learn and take that knowledge with me into some future where maybe, a bestseller awaits.
I’m looking forward to a post-grad school life. I get to start over again, career-wise, life-wise, which is awesome and terrifying at the same time. I’ll eventually end up in the Bay Area again, though I don’t know if it will be sooner or later. Maybe I’ll live in another country first. I know I’ll travel a bit. That much I know. I get frustrated with my siblings sometimes for not reaching higher, farther. I often remind them that Mom and Dad weren’t able to give us much in material goods when we were growing up, but what they did give us was opportunity, and boatloads of it. Seize it. Grab it by its horns and ride it out ’til another one comes by. As the guru Tim Gunn says, “Make it work, goddammit!” (I’m paraphrasing.)
Oddly enough, I can’t say it was the worst year on record. I’ve got my health. I’ve got a partner who’s been here with me through the darkness and the light. I’ve got some darling, amazing, wonderful, beautiful friends who’ve been dears this year. I’ve got a crazy family who Dad would be proud to see are sticking together through it all, just like everyone remembers us, like how all eight of us would share a single room on vacation when we were young.
This is the real shit, people. Life. We’re gonna be all right.
Dad took my sister M and me to the Girl Scout Father-Daughter Sock Hop a few years in a row when we were little. He wore his high school letter sweater with the big blue L near the pockets and held our hands as we walked into the multi-purpose room of a local junior high, M in her purple homemade poodle skirt, me in my pink. Dad twirled each of us around, smiling victoriously when he saw our skirts fan out around us and our gleeful giggles rising above “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Shout.”
There is no other way to say this. Dad died on August 4. The last journal entry I wrote was on July 12, the day before the doctors told us that he might not make it. The only piece of writing I’ve completely this entire summer was his obituary. Like so many others who have had the air sucked out of them with the loss of a parent, words are inadequate.
