monday, 30 october, 2000

No sidebar today.

A new look, on the index page anyway. A new look for a new beginning. My dear readers, I have had so many things to tell you these last few weeks. I have pages and pages of half-written entries and turbonoted reminders and paper journal scribblings, all trying to figure out what exactly is going on in my head. I am tired, soulfully tired. But I also feel like I am on the brink... of new things, of good things. I start my new job next Monday. Finally, I received an offer. I had gotten a call about a week ago from the woman who interviewed me, and she said that provided my background check came through, they would be extending an offer. So what is that, like a 99% certainty? I have no background to check, and if there was something there I didn't know about, I knew the Missouri bar examiners would have found it, since I practically had to give blood with my bar application. And yet I had to worry that 1% like a loose tooth. But this afternoon, the placement agency called and confirmed the offer, and at a higher salary than what had first been indicated to me. Weight lifted. I'm employed. {--}          {--}          {--} But there are other things too, that have been weighing on my mind. Things that can't be alleviated by people giving me jobs. I got some news this week that shook me much more than I ever thought it would. My best friend in elementary school was a girl who lived two houses up the street from me. I think she was about a year and a half younger than me, a couple of grades behind, but we usually walked to and from school together. I spent many weekends at her lakehouse, we slept over at each other's houses, all the usual elementary school playmate stuff. Anyway, I was talking to my own mother and she said that she had gotten a call from one of her old friends here in Kansas City who told her that my friend's mother had died from cancer. She was 63. At first it was just sad, remembering someone from my childhood who was always such a nice person. But then it really started to get to me. I pictured my friend and I jumping on her trampoline or roller skating in my basement and thought about someone showing up and telling us that one of our mothers would be dead before we were 30. And it could just as easily have been mine. But I couldn't think about that. I was actually just having this discussion not too long ago with Mary. She had a friend from the town she lived in after college whose father just died from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. Just out mowing the lawn one day, got stung by a bee, knew he was allergic but couldn't get to his medication in time. And we started thinking about that, and about how all of our circle of friends here still have both parents, and how that's going to start to change pretty soon. And I thought about my friend Katherine from law school, whose mother died a week after Katherine's 21st birthday. And about my friend Dana from Los Angeles, whose father died when she was 9. And about my mother, who was 52 when her mother died and whose father will be 95 on Friday. And about my father, who was 16 when his father died and whose mother just turned 88. Who knows how it works. I never imagined that the death of a woman I haven't seen in fifteen years would have affected me like this. I guess it just brought a few things home, things I'd rather not think about. {--}          {--}          {--} My friend Mary called me this evening and asked me if I wanted to meet her coworker at the Nelson-Atkins (KC's biggest art museum) on Saturday. Meet her coworker. As in, sort of, a date. I've only met him briefly, and I mean very briefly, about thirty seconds, on the day of my interview. Mary and Gillian work about four blocks from where I'll be working, and after my interview I went down to see their office and go to lunch. Mary was introducing me around. She had told me about him before, about how she had tried to set him up with our friend Tara, but it just wasn't a match. He's a little shy, for one thing. Shy enough to ask Mary to arrange things, rather than call me himself. Which doesn't actually bother me, to tell you the truth. I'm chicken like that too. So at first I wanted to make it a group thing, but Tara yelled at me, so we're going by ourselves. It's probably a perfect first date, the museum. It's not like you can run out of things to talk about when you're in a museum, because you're surrounded by conversation pieces. And I don't know the first thing about him except that he's 31, so there will be much background information to discuss. It's kind of a lot for me in one day, a job offer and a date. Not to mention some sort of weird psychological flux that I'm still floating around in. But like I do feel like the clouds are drifting away, finally. It's been a long year.