ugh

I had a terrible dream early this morning that I was at work and they'd changed the cash register around and i couldn't figure out how to ring anything up, and it was busy and I was by myself and I simply couldn't handle it, and I completely lost it and broke down sobbing.

That was just great.

I thought: Maybe I should call in this weekend. Maybe I should go home to Melrose and spend the weekend with mom and dad, and Ann and her boyfriend Vijay-who-I've-never-met (he spent last summer in Antarctica studying penguins), and cousin Jessie and cousin Maureen and her fiancee Tim. And we could all be together and all call Norway together.
So I called Mom to see what she thought. She said don't be silly, go to work. So that was the end of that thought.

I guess it was just a bad dream, and it's not like it's an omen, and she's right-- what would I do? So, off to work I go.

I did offer her one constructive thing, which was that she should check her email. Because Aleksander sent an email to "our dear cousins" last night, and addressed it to all of us, but I noticed that I was the only one of my sisters whose email address appeared in the headers, so I forwarded it all around, including to Mom and Dad.
( excerpt of the email )

So that's still all I know. I spent two hours yesterday afternoon trying to think of what to write them in a card, and mailed it on my way to pick Z up from work, but it takes a long time for mail to cross the Atlantic.

(no subject)

I made a bunch of new user icons the other day. These loyalty pics things-- man, I just don't know what to do with all these icons.
*throws them on floor, rolls around in them*
Ahh.

I appear to be listening to Pearl Jam. Are things really that bad? Maybe.

Today actually treated me gently right up until nearly the end. It was weird: I wanted to immediately blurt out to coworkers what had happened to my relatives, sort of-- I kept coming back to it in my head and it seemed wrong that I was the only one to know this-- but then, how do you bring it up?

I just hate when something awful happens and life separates itself into Before and After, or, worse, Before I Knew and After I Heard.
And it's stupid, because it's not like he was a daily fact of my life. That's so much worse, when someone is gone and it's a huge aching hole in your routine-- that takes years and years to heal. Me, I am just so worried about my cousins, and my aunt (since they are experiencing the worst sort of that kind of loss, and with such terrible questions besetting them on top of it-- above all, why and how and worse), because I do care for them, and not in an every-day kind of way, not in a I-see-them-often kind of way-- not even in an I-think-of-them-often kind of way, but in a they are and that is part of who I am kind of way. Which is how family is-- I have the great good fortune of having discovered that with most of my blood relations and relations-by-marriage, whether or not I see them often, when I do I click with them in a way that makes it obvious that we are of one origin, that we have something essential in common. I can't explain it better, but we are related parts of some whole thing, and it's a lovely feeling, and to feel that something within that has broken is upsetting.

Uh. (Noise of weariness.) Then at the end of the day all sorts of irritating bullshit happened, and I wound up very tired and very cranky and very fragile, and I had a brief moment when I admitted tearfully to a coworker that I just wanted my mommy. (She had the grace to simply laugh sympathetically and say "I know", and give me a moment to get my shit together.)

I told Z we have to go to Norway sometime in the coming months and he said "sure". I haven't yet started to figure out how much that would cost. I have money; I was considering getting a car but once it is warm, Z can use his scooter, so I have at least six months now until I actually would even want a car. So all that money: Europe. There's a reason I never buy myself shoes or a coat. It is because you never know when you are going to need to go to Europe.

I forgot, yesterday: I was thinking, I have no photos of my late uncle! Oh I have not seen him in years and ye-- But durrrr, he was at Katy's wedding. I have not only photos of him, but over a dozen photos he himself took. All my pictures of the ceremony were from his camera. And then I remembered talking about photography with him and I just cannot fathom what has happened. So. Enough thinking, I suppose, for now.

I got home, weary and cranky and footsore, and informed Z we were going to go out and eat. We decided to go to John's Italian Village, which is a lovely little Italian place on Grant St., on Buffalo's West Side. It's not a fancy restauraunt, but you can get wonderful, somewhat fancy food. We went all-out and still spent less than $40. It filled a space that needed filling. I informed Z that the cannoli I had for dessert had "filled the cannoli-shaped hole in my heart that was also cannoli-sized" (a reference to an ancient inside joke among Z's friends), and he coined the term "cannolellogram" to describe it.

But what, I wonder sadly, of the world's Kjellellogram? To utterly trivialize the matter, and yet, I am such a trivial person after all that I cannot help it. That is not something one can fill.