Tender · Virago

I'm siiick. I'm sick. I hate being sick. I feel yucky. Buzzy. Headachey from no caffeine. Worn out.

Eh, that's all I have the energy for. I hope I can get some sleep tonight.

She's smart and sarcastic and funny. She loves books; she loves to write. Cute in a nerdy-cool way. A little overweight, like most of us. She's planning to replace her PC fan after Christmas. She is 33. A few days ago, she hurt her foot in dance class. Except the pain wasn't caused by dance class, it was a clot that went to her heart and boom, now she's dead.

This past weekend, a woman whom I didn't even know died. In fact, lots of people died, some of them closer to home than this woman. But this woman's death touched me particularly, because I see a little of myself in her. I see how death, ever the prankster, loves to spring upon you when you're not prepared. I imagine her loved ones, thinking of her last minutes, and wondering. If she knew her time was up, would she have said she was happy with her life?

Lots of people are going to miss her. She was one of those people that dunked her whole head into life's apple-barrel. She did things and met people and lived. And good for her, and it's sad that she died.

I'm not that kind of person, and when I die, lots of people aren't going to miss me. I want the people who matter to me to know that this does not make me sad. I never wanted a life full of activities and friends and Significant Works. All I wanted my whole life was someone I loved, who saw me and loved me for the fundamentally good person I believed myself to be. And I found him. And I married him.

He is so smart, and funny (although not always in the way he means to be), and he is such a male in every way, and adorable in those ways. He's always in charge, and he's so scary and James Bond-ian when you first meet him -- but he is so generous, and thoughtful, and has a tender heart that he hides from everyone except me and a few very close friends. I can tell you this, because if you ever meet him, you'll never believe me. All you will see is James Bond. But take my word for it.

He is the first person I ever believed loved me with his whole heart, the only person I ever believed would stick with me, and he is resolute about my worthiness even when I am not. There is not one thing I do not love about him, even the bad things, because his bad things are my bad things, and I understand them.

My husband doesn't believe in an afterlife or in fate. I do, and if ever I start to doubt I remember two things -- an out-of-body experience I had when I was four or five years old, and the extraordinary coincidences that led me to meet and marry my husband. There was a cosmic intervention, and I thank Whomever for it. That's a story for another day, though.

On the path to meeting my husband and my fate, I met some other very interesting people. Some were bad-interesting, but most were good-interesting. One was extraordinary, and he has been my friend for 23 years. Sometimes we're talking, and sometimes we're not, but either way we know we are each other's closest friend. If one of us is in need, the other is there. If I could choose a friend from all the people on earth in all the history of the world, I would choose him. He is one of the people who will be missed by lots of people when he dies, and it makes me feel extraordinary myself to I am a special person in his special life.

My husband is my chosen family, and my friend is my chosen brother, but I also have a really great and weird biological family. Every one of them is brilliant, and every one is strange and beautiful, creative and unique in the world. I think of each of them -- my mother, my brother, my grandfather (who was as much my father as anyone) and my grandmother -- more often than anyone knows. Why don't they know? Because we're a family that loves each other but never talks to each other. And that's fine. But the thought of them influences me almost daily.

Maybe the last thing I will write about is my PC fan. But at least this will be out here, and the ones who matter will know.

Five years ago today, we lived on the 52nd floor, the top floor, of a high-rise apartment building in the River North neighborhood of Chicago. We had a breathtaking view of Lake Michigan, bounded on the east by the John Hancock building, about three blocks away.

My husband worked at a small Internet company nearby. It was a beautiful blue day, and as he hopped into the shower, he asked me to check the temperature to see if it was warm enough to walk to work. I turned on my computer.

My Yahoo home page loaded, but ... slowly. Shit. The building was wired for high-speed internet, but every now and again it would crap out. Still, I could see the weather: High 70s for a high. Nice. And ... what the hell?

In the News section, a picture of the World Trade Center with a diagonal smoky hole in it.

"Honey!" I called to my just-showered husband in the other room. "A plane hit the World Trade Center!"

I tried clicking on the story, but it wouldn't load. I tried to go to CNN, but it wouldn't come up either. Damn! Stupid Internet! Then I remembered that back in the olden days, one would watch TV for the news. So I turned on the TV.

My husband says we saw the second plane hit live. I don't remember that, although the timing would be right. Doesn't matter. We saw it plenty of times after that. When the first tower went down, we were watching Aaron Brown talking. Aaron stopped talking and turned around to look. Did his voice break when he turned back to the camera? I think it did, but I can't remember. I said something like "It collapsed," but my husband said it was just smoky. I said no, it fell. He was pointing at the smoky column when it started blowing away, revealing a whole lot of nothing. That's the last thing I remember my husband saying for a few hours. I found out later he was so enraged he literally could have killed someone.

There wasn't any question when the second one fell -- we saw the antenna at the top descending into the smoke like the mast of a sinking ship.

Our friend came over at some point to watch with us. He and my husband starting drinking beer at about 10:00 am. I don't remember when he left.

When I finally showered, I did it quickly. I didn't know if our building would be evacuated soon or not. We were directly under the spot where planes turned to make their final approach to O'Hare.

I sat at the edge of our sofa, curled up against the wall, my feet tucked under me, watching, for about 15 hours. I didn't cry until the Congresspeople broke into "God Bless America".

The next day, I looked out with some disbelief at another beautiful blue sky. The world was the same, and the world was changed. For the first time since I moved to Chicago, there was no string of planes lining up to O'Hare airport. The sky was completely empty. I thought, "If I can just see a plane, I'll know everything will be normal again eventually." That afternoon, I saw my first plane -- a fighter flying great circles high above the city. Nothing was going to be normal again.

A few days later, I tried walking down our 52 flights of stairs to try and understand what it felt like. Of course, I didn't have the threat of fire and collapse behind me, and I wasn't surrounded by smoke and panic. When I reached the bottom, my legs were shaky, barely able to hold me up. I knew I never could have run away.

I was in shock for a week. I had nightmares for a month. I was a morose depressive mess for a year. Eventually I got myself back by giving up on watching the news. I still think we're all doomed, but I'm more okay with it these days. I guess that's what watching a massive dose of inexplicable violence and death on live TV will do to your outlook.

Things also happen in July.

Remember last year, when Hubby played an online poker tournament at the very last minute and won a seat to the World Series of Poker? So yeah, he did it again. One seat at the WSOP: $10,000. One free hotel room (probably at the Monte Carlo) for the duration of his stay: Up to $1,000. Mad money from PokerStars: $1,000. Playing in the biggest tournament in poker: Priceless. The top prize is $10,000,000. He's flying out on Thursday. Wheeeee!

"Everything happens in October," I said:

• My husband's company's biggest client renews its service and sends a big honkin' check
  
• The IRS is paid and out of our lives
  
• I go back to school
  
• Arrangements for a trip to Vegas to watch my friend get married in early November
  
• Final Fantasy XII is released (yes, I know I'm almost 40, eff you)
  
• My brother makes a big decision about his life
  

I think there are more things, but they're not coming to me at the moment. Those are the biggies. October is an auspicious month! I just hope Iran, North Korea, and/or GWB don't decide to start a nuclear war between now and then.

In case you were on tenterhooks about the result of my Intro to Programming class, I just got the grade back. 4.0's all around, again. Now I just have to ponder what it all meeeans.

So, anyway.

For the last few weeks, I've been hunkered down with the homework in my two latest classes. Intro to Programming was without a doubt the worst class I've taken so far at KU. The online curricula were out of date and only tangentially related to the subject, but we students were forced to incorporate it into our discussions anyway. The "professor" (more on the ironic quotes in a minute) was barely involved with the class, and she was an incredibly easy grader. Two of my weekly assignments that got A's didn't deserve it -- one probably deserved a B and the other one an F. Why am I bitching about that? Because I want my grade to mean something, and this lack of attention or standards makes me wonder what a degree at KU is worth. Anyway, thank God (and Joyce Farrell) for the "Programming Logic and Design" textbook, the best I've had at KU so far, and from which I learned everything.

Website Tools -- essentially a class about how to use the Web software Dreamweaver -- was similarly disappointing. Another uninvolved "professor", another disturbingly easy grader. This time, the textbook wasn't so great, but it was serviceable. I put in hours and hours to produce (from scratch, be impressed) this site for my final. I was up until 3:00 AM the day I turned it in. It was due by 9:00 AM and by 10:00 am he had reviewed and graded it. Possible? Yes, I suppose. He gave me 100%, even though I saw an mistake on it as soon as I saw it again that morning. (If you're interested, the mistake is that I was supposed to link the charity site from the home page.) Oh, well.

My 4.0 streak will likely remain unbroken. I'm still waiting for my final grade in Intro to Programming, and there's a part of me that thinks she might be compensatingly tough on my final (even though it's good and I believe it deserves an "A"), since I wrote a scathing assessment of her the week before. Sure, the assessments are supposed to be anonymous, but how anonymous could they be when you have about 12 students, all with different writing styles, whose opinion you can pretty much guess as you've gotten to know them over 10 weeks?

Regarding the quote marks around "professor": The leaders of KU courses are people with real-world experience in the subject they teach. I don't know what KU requires in terms of education experience, but my personal experience with six different teachers has varied wildly. My algebra teacher was definitely an educator. My very first professor might not have been a teacher in real life, but her enthusiasm for learning went a long way toward setting my expectation about a teacher's level of involvement in class. Thinking of her got me through this semester. Anyway, I've always felt weird about calling the KU staff "Professor", because I thought a "professor" had to have a PhD, but the Princeton Web site says that a professor is "someone who is a member of the faculty at a college or university." (Of course, at Princeton, you probably can't be a member of the faculty without a PhD.) I guess calling the KU academicians "Professor" is okay. Most of them want you to call them by their first names, but I'm not gonna do that.

Overall, these last few weeks have been daunting to my desire to continue at KU.

So! I'm taking a term off. KU allows you to test out of some courses and present an (ahem) "Experiential Learning Portfolio" for others, so I'll busy myself with that until the following term begins in October. Everything happens in October! (More on that cryptic phrase soon.)

I have an opinion about what is poetry and what is not poetry.

This is poetry:

In contact, lo! the flint and steel,
By sharp and flame, the thought reveal
That he the metal, she the stone,
Had cherished secretly alone.

This is poetry:

Genius elevates its possessor to ineffable spheres
far above the vulgar world and fills his soul
with regal contempt for the gross and sordid things of earth.

It is probably on account of this
that people who have genius
do not pay their board, as a general thing.

This is poetry:

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
That call me on and on across the universe,
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box they
Tumble blindly as they make their way
Across the universe

This, on the other hand:

Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day's lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.

...is a post-it note on a refrigerator door.

Why is it that people who can bash some words together until an image or two falls out are automatically labeled poets? And if they live in the New Hampshire backwoods, why, that lends them the extra touch of legitimacy they need to be our newest poet laureate.

What a great luxury it is, to be able to ruminate about my purpose in life. I don't have to grow or kill my own food. I have clothes, a home, a high-speed internet connection, and an astonishing array of entertainment options. I have a husband who loves and supports me, a family, a few friends. I'm healthy, relatively speaking. I mostly like who I am. And with four of the basic needs in Maslow's Hierarchy addressed, I'm free to wonder why I am here, why I have all these talents, what purpose do they serve if no one knows about them, and will Whomever be disappointed with me if I don't use them?

One might infer from the Hierarchy of Needs that self-actualization is an instinctual need as much as breathing and eating are, only less urgent. I wonder, though. I wonder whether the drive to achieve is coded into our DNA from a time when it was "achieve or be eaten by a stegosaurus," or if it's tacked onto us by our environment, particularly in the American go-go-go, "rich = worthy" society. Were we not, in fact, created to wander an Eden in contemplative bliss? Or, if you prefer, did our ancestors not evolve to this point to enable their descendants an easier life? It doesn't get much easier than this.

In a world where everything has been achieved, what else is there to do but enjoy it?

The producers of The Lake House changed the name of their movie three times: From the foreign and therefore scary Il Mare (after a restaurant in the movie), to The Sea (which wouldn't have made sense, since the restaurant is named "Il Mare", and the water featured in the movie is a lake, not the sea), and finally, The Lake House. If you have one of them furrin names, having Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock as your leads won't be enough to bring in the dopey American viewer, apparently.

It seems the director had a similar distrust for his actors, as he constantly squashed their natural charm by forcing them to adhere too closely to the eighth-grade level screenplay. For only one moment in a scene between Bullock and Shohreh Aghdashloo, the actors jump the rail a little and have fun with the material. It was disheartening to see that the movie could have been this charming throughout, if it were allowed to be. Just as depressing was Christopher Plummer. He can charm me in almost any movie, even when he's playing a terrible person, but he had the life sucked out of him here in more ways than one. The movie takes itself much too seriously, to the point of being ridiculous, so that when the genuinely serious scenes come, I was unmoved by them. The only captivating moments come when Bullock and Reeves finally just shut up and kiss already.

Because of the relentless solemnity, the movie felt a lot longer than an hour and 45 minutes. Also, Sandra Bullock, who is my runner-up girl crush behind Drew Barrymore, had a very, very bad wig on through most of the movie, and Keanu was semi-scruffy and dressed in bad colors (according to my husband), so you couldn’t even distract yourself with simple lusting after the actors.

I’d say "wait for cable," but I don’t know that I'd even recommend it then.