Dignified and old
May. 28th, 2003 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupOn May 28, 1988, fifteen years ago today, a good friend of mine in high school, Stephen Cirota, locked himself naked in the garage with the car running and suffocated to death.
It hit me deeply at the time and on some level I know my subconscious drifts over to it a fair amount. I can't say that in all these years anything about it has made any more sense to me. You learn a lot about human reaction under stress and how people try to deal with something terrible, but the act itself remains closed, impenetrable.
In a strange way, I do feel sometimes as though my life since then has been a parallel of all the things he would have experienced if he had stuck around. It's like the clock started ticking on life after that. One month, three months, one year, five years, ten years, fifteen years... of life he never saw.
It is not something I talk about much. For a long time I was suspicious of myself for talking about it, as though it would make me seem "deep" or "cool" or something. That little extra cachet of heartbreaking tragedy to awe your friends and impress the chicks. I still don't talk about it, much, because after a while, there isn't that much left to say. Anyway. I thought something should be noted, somewhere.
-----------------------------
Back from Maine and plunged into nonstop work and teaching once again. There really is an element that when you are up there, you would almost rather not have come at all than to have to leave. Not exactly a vacation from life, but how life would be without all the distractors, and with great scenery all around, and a general air of satisfaction. A great place to be when it rains.
But all vacations come to an end, and in the meantime I am scrambling to teach these 4-hour classes. I finally did it right tonight by preparing documents for them to do group work and not have to listen to me blather for the full four hours. It paid off, but it took so freaking long to find all the sources. Also highlights how as always there is this gulf between what I am saying and what they are hearing -- like I will be talking about virtue and corruption as ideas in 18th century British politics, and someone will ask what "democracy" means or something. These survey classes are incredibly hard in that respect -- how to turn on the people with a background without losing people who don't know anything about the subject. So I am just exhausted.
One big plus: the Mrs. managed, by some miracle of will, to get the baby to sleep without being swaddled, which means less frustration for her and fewer wake-ups during the night. I hope, I hope, just maybe, we have turned something of a corner...
I have about a million other things to write about, but I am just too tired.
It hit me deeply at the time and on some level I know my subconscious drifts over to it a fair amount. I can't say that in all these years anything about it has made any more sense to me. You learn a lot about human reaction under stress and how people try to deal with something terrible, but the act itself remains closed, impenetrable.
In a strange way, I do feel sometimes as though my life since then has been a parallel of all the things he would have experienced if he had stuck around. It's like the clock started ticking on life after that. One month, three months, one year, five years, ten years, fifteen years... of life he never saw.
It is not something I talk about much. For a long time I was suspicious of myself for talking about it, as though it would make me seem "deep" or "cool" or something. That little extra cachet of heartbreaking tragedy to awe your friends and impress the chicks. I still don't talk about it, much, because after a while, there isn't that much left to say. Anyway. I thought something should be noted, somewhere.
-----------------------------
Back from Maine and plunged into nonstop work and teaching once again. There really is an element that when you are up there, you would almost rather not have come at all than to have to leave. Not exactly a vacation from life, but how life would be without all the distractors, and with great scenery all around, and a general air of satisfaction. A great place to be when it rains.
But all vacations come to an end, and in the meantime I am scrambling to teach these 4-hour classes. I finally did it right tonight by preparing documents for them to do group work and not have to listen to me blather for the full four hours. It paid off, but it took so freaking long to find all the sources. Also highlights how as always there is this gulf between what I am saying and what they are hearing -- like I will be talking about virtue and corruption as ideas in 18th century British politics, and someone will ask what "democracy" means or something. These survey classes are incredibly hard in that respect -- how to turn on the people with a background without losing people who don't know anything about the subject. So I am just exhausted.
One big plus: the Mrs. managed, by some miracle of will, to get the baby to sleep without being swaddled, which means less frustration for her and fewer wake-ups during the night. I hope, I hope, just maybe, we have turned something of a corner...
I have about a million other things to write about, but I am just too tired.
