Bullets of Tuesday

Well, the enjoyment and self-discipline continue unabated (or so I'm telling myself). 

• Met a classmate/colleague at Peet's Coffee to work on our theses together.  In reality, we spent several hours catching up after not having talked much throughout the year, though we did spend an hour or two actually working.  She was a bit hungover, so we cut the afternoon short.  I did stay a little longer than she, but then it got cold again so I went home.
• It's been cold-ish here.  It's as if we traded weather with Seattle.  I love the misty-rain and cloudy mornings. but the rest of our locale is complaining mightily (they'd be complaining it if was wretchedly hot, too).  On Monday, the sun only managed to break through for about half an hour, in the very late afternoon.  Today it managed a couple of hours, but again, only in the afternoon.  We'll see what tomorrow brings. 
• Today the rain-ish-ness kept me in bed longer than I had planned.  It's ok, though, as I was reading a book for my thesis, so it counted as work. 
• Tomorrow I will head to Starbucks for the majority of the day, to work.  I'm supposed to email my advisor "something" by Friday.  (Gah.)
• Thursday is the funeral for Madame X's dad.  Madame X reported having a day that actually felt "normal" today, for which I am grateful.  It's been difficult to know how to provide support to her and her family, which is odd to say about someone I've known and loved for over a decade.  I think the books and movie gift card were the right things, though;  she called today to thank us for them and let us know she's already used the gift card (which helped lead to the shreds of normalcy today).  After the funeral, she and her family may have to head to parts north to see her grandmother once more before the dementia sets in full-bore.  Pardon my English, but Madame X has had a fucked-up year, and I know she won't be sorry to see 2010 get hit in the butt by the door on its way out. 
• Saw Winter's Bone, and it was excellent.  They made a few changes between the book and the film, but it did not detract from the story in any way.  My only criticism is that the beating one of the main characters receive is in no way as intense in the movie as it was in the book.  That was probably motivated by a desire to spare the viewer the discomfort and gore, but it weakened the impact of the later plot events, at least for me in comparing it with the book.  They definitely nailed the casting dead-on, and the setting is just perfect.  I recommend both the film and the book.
• I think Despicable Me comes out this Friday, doesn't it?  Strangely, I'm really looking forward to seeing it.  When I first started seeing trailers for it, like, last year, I was fairly meh about it.  But since I've seen more detailed trailers recently, I'm hooked.  "It's so FLUFFY, I could die!"  (LOL.)
• I walked today. 
• I've been obsessively checking the College Board's website to see if our AP scores have been posted yet.  This is the first year we get to check them online (finally, join me in welcoming the CB to the 21st century), but they're not up yet, at least not for my school.  Sigh.  The curiosity is giving me heartburn (or was that the KFC I indulged in earlier?). 
• This was a pretty boring post, but I'm in documentary mode, I guess.  Thanks for reading. 

Sad start to summer

My dear friend and colleague, who likes to go by Madame X on my blog, lost her father on Wednesday.  He had only been ill for about four weeks.  It started as a UTI and pneumonia, which they treated with antibiotics, but then they discovered liver lesions and diagnosed it as cancer.  He went downhill very quickly.  They never did kick the infection, and they never discovered where the cancer originated (rarely does cancer start in the liver, and his was no exception), but they named the cause of death as metastatic liver cancer.  Her family will not have an autopsy done because, I think, they're just exhausted.  This is sobering to me, because Madame X is not yet 37, just one year older than my own younger sister.  I know death can strike at any time, but it's weird when your close friend loses a parent. 

I had a student in my AP class this year lose his mother just two weeks before school ended.  She had fought cancer for over 13 years, but after beating it so many times, she lost this round.  He didn't make a big deal about it;  in fact, he didn't really want a lot of people to know.  I only learned about it in the final personal essay I had them write.  It explained why he'd looked like such hell lately, and why he had missed several days of class after a year of essentially perfect attendance.  How do you comfort a kid who's less than half your age and experiencing a pain you can only imagine in your nightmares?  All I could do was hug him;  at least I'm good at those. 

POM's sister continues her own battle with cancer on multiple staging grounds.  Her long-term forced relationship with steroids (to reduce swelling in the brain where gamma knife surgery removed a tumor -- twice) has caused her to blow up like a human balloon.  This once stringbean blond looks like a perpetually pregnant air-filled weeble.  And like a weeble, she keeps bouncing back up after every punch.  Her faith astonishes me daily.  She lives for her five kids, the oldest of whom just graduated from junior high and the youngest of whom is starting preschool.  She's just come off the steroids, a development she's thrilled about, but despite good news about no more brain tumor, she's weathering bad news about her liver and lungs, where innumerable active cancer sites are now present in spite of the chemo round she just finished. 

Our only role in these situations is one of support -- praying, being a conduit of information to other pray-ers around the world, filling in where a babysitter or chauffeur or photographer or hugger is needed.  It never feels like enough.