Opening Night at Nationals Park

While on line for hot dogs, I told Dan that I felt like a twelve-year-old. The stadium was so bright, so new, so . . . amazing. And that was before the game even started, let alone how it ended.

But words don't really do it justice. Here are my pictures:

























And here's the video of the ceremonial first pitch:

T-shirt Meme

I stumbled across this t-shirt meme on Casual Slack, and realized that not only was it apropos, but it has been quite some time since I blogged about t-shirts.

Here are the rules:
1. Link back to the original post.
2. Describe two t-shirts that you own.
3. If you design your own vanity t-shirt what would it say?
4. Where would you wear your vanity t-shirt?
5. Tag three of your best blogging buds.

So, without further adieu, here are three blue t-shirts:

1. This one's my favorite:




2. This one used to be my dad's, a long long time ago:




3. If I were going to design a vanity t-shirt, it would probably be dumb. I'm much better at expressing myself through other people's t-shirts. But I really like this one:




4. I would probably wind up wearing the Jordan Catalano t-shirt to the same places that I wear all of my silly t-shirts to. Which is pretty much everywhere that doesn't have a dress code. But I would definitely wear it while watching my My So-Called Life DVDs.

5. I will not tag anyone on this. People hate being tagged.

Do not try this at home

I managed to get my taxes filed on Monday. Thank god for TurboTax. And Wesley Snipes.

Loneliness

Last night, I had a pretty long telephone conversation with my dad. He's not much of a complainer -- or a talker -- but apparently, the quiet of being in the house by himself is starting to get to him. How do I know this? He actually said that he couldn't see spending the rest of his life in the house, by himself.

He also asked me if, theoretically, I would have a problem with him dating.

I didn't know how to respond to that. The whole idea of having a single parent is so foreign to me. Plus I don't think he's ready as much as he's just lonely and used to having someone there all the time, the way it had been for the prior 34 years. So I said "Dating is such a loaded word."

He didn't know what I meant. We then had a discourse about how, to his generation, pretty much any time you make plans to do something with someone, it's a date. I laughed when he said that, because if that were true, I date a lot more than I think I do.

I told him that's what his kids call "hanging out."

I then decided it would be fun to turn the tables on him: I asked him if he has a problem with me dating. He thought about the question for a second, and said, "Only when I think about it."

Ah, there's the rub. Anything is okay as long as you're not thinking about it.

And in that line, the more I think about the conversation, the more bothered I am by it. Why is it that my dad hasn't even been living by himself for two months and he is so bothered by it, where I've been living by myself for the better part of six years, and I find it so much more palatable than the alternative? I mean, I absolutely relish having my own space.

I guess maybe I should be lonelier.

Productivity

With the revelation that it's not really true that watching basketball during March Madness decreases my productivity, I've been thinking about my work productivity and how it could be better.

Clearly, the answer to that is "take away my internet access." Forget about managing basketball brackets; it's the reading websites and email that suck away all my time.

But you know what I really learned today? I'm currently at the pinnacle of my productivity: It's scientifically proven that I'll be way less productive if I ever have kids. That is a scary, scary thought.

Still, what scares me more is how this is surprising enough to merit a study.

Precious things

My mother loved jewelry. She loved to go into shops, look in the glass cases, try things on. Once she said she was going to buy some stones and start designing her own pieces.

Her taste was so different from mine. I like very simple and small things, she liked things you could see from another zip code. But it didn't stop her from buying me (and my sister) all sorts of necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings. Most people would never know about this, because I tend to wear the same couple of pieces all the time.

For example, there's one necklace I wear more often than any of the others. It's a small gold chain with a small gold letter "D." The charm was something that someone got for me when I was a very little girl. I think it was because someone had bought my sister something with her name on it, and got me the "D" as a way of making it up to me that we could never, ever find anything in any store with my name on it. I was so young at the time that I don't really know who got it for me -- whether it was my mother or one of my grandmothers or even someone else. What I do know is that it's something I cherish.

I also have one bracelet that I wear pretty much every day -- a very thin gold bracelet with hearts. My mother bought me this bracelet when I was 20 or 21, for Hanukkah. It actually was the first bracelet she got in what became a series of birthday/holiday bracelets, one each year for five or six years. It got to the point that I would make jokes about the "annual bracelet."

Because of the link pattern and the fact that it's very small and dainty, the bracelet is one of my favorite things, and I've worn it pretty much every day since I got it. I pretty much don't take it off, and it's so small that I often forget it's there. I forgot to take it off when I made my mosaic tables that are now plant stands, so there was tile grout stuck in several of the links for years. More recently, one of the hearts snagged on something and bent. And then today, one of the links started to break.

So, I took the bracelet to get it fixed. They charged me $40. I'm not entirely sure that my mother even paid that much for the goddamn thing, but I paid it anyway. I guess it was worth that much.

Musings on the state of celebrity journalism

I don't remember how, but earlier today, I stumbled across this Salon article about celebrity gossip. It actually made reference to the Atlantic Monthly article about being a papparazzo on the trail of Britney that I read yesterday. Which was totally the point of last night's South Park.

But I digress.

I started reading the article at my desk while eating my lunch and I laughed out loud enough times that I decided that, in order to prevent choking, it would be best to put down my fork until I got to the end. Here are the most ridiculous morsels, with commentary:

• ". . . all I could do was stare at my candy-colored cover choices, recognize in some dazed way that I didn't know what a Heidi or a Spencer was. . . ."

Man, I miss that feeling. I kept hearing those names, along with L.C. and Brody, and I had no idea who these people were. Alas, then I stumbled across an episode of The Hills and now I wish I could go back to the earlier, more innocent time.

• "Perhaps the biggest shift in how we ingest our gossip, though, is the feeling of over-saturation and over-stimulation. We have gorged ourselves on nip-slips and sex tapes and divorce proceedings to the point of queasiness at the idea of consuming another morsel of celebrity meat. Or maybe that's just me."

It's just you, hon. How else can you explain the number of magazines that are being sold, the number of gossip websites and blogs, or the fact that Jennifer Lopez sold her babies' first pictures to People for god-knows-how-much. Just because two magazines folded doesn't mean the celebrity gossip industry is going down. My suspicion is that it has more to do with the nature of print journalism.

• ". . . a slew of midlevel actors . . . were only likely to make really juicy national headlines if they did something incontrovertibly nutty, hopefully in front of a wandering photographer: Julia Roberts ditching Keifer Sutherland before their wedding, Rob Lowe bedding an underage chick at the Democratic convention, married Bruce Springsteen cavorting in his skivvies with the girl in his band on a Rome rooftop."

How is this any different than Britney marrying her childhood friend on a drunken whim in Vegas or Brad Pitt ditching Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie and then adopting half of the world's population?

• Picking up an US Weekly no longer guarantees a visit with a cast of familiar characters, but a roster of mysterious names: Minka Kelly, Benji Madden, Stacy Keibler -- who the hell are these people and what are they doing in my imagined celebrity neighborhood?

Just because you don't know or really care about them doesn't make them non-celebrities. And people have been famous for being famous for as long as there's been such things.

• "And to read up on those names I do recognize, I no longer need to turn to the tabloids. Not when Wall Street Journal writer Asra Nomani is writing Op-Eds for the L.A. Times about Britney Spears, or the Atlantic is putting her on its cover. . . .When Heath Ledger died in his Manhattan apartment, it was the New York Times that led the coverage of the story, and by the time the celebrity weeklies hit stands after the death of Anna Nicole Smith, CNN had been covering the story for four days in a row, with more vigor than it might apply even to a tight primary contest."

So let me get this straight: Celebrity gossip is dead because the mainstream media is doing it? That so does not make sense.

• ". . . I find myself longing for a return to some old-fashioned canned stories cooked up by publicists and pegged to movie releases. I'm over stars being just like me, or worse off than me. I would like them to be different, and more glamorous, and better . . . I would like to read about their attractive homes and perfect relationships and healthy but satisfying Zone diets and think to myself: "Well, easy for them! They're celebrities!""

Clearly, you're not reading the right magazines. Put down the US Weekly and try Vogue or Glamour or In Style or even Vanity Fair if you just want to see celebrities all dressed up and leading enviably perfect and interesting lives.

Interesting quizzes

Yesterday, Gene Weingarten's chat linked to two face recognition tests. I only missed one on the celebrity quiz, but I only scored an 86% on the regular test. Clearly this means that way too much of my brain is devoted to utter nonsense.

Then, today, my brother sent me this quiz where the complete lyrics for a well-known rock song placed in alphabetical order, with each word appearing no more than once (regardless of how many times it appears in the actual song) - and you're supposed to guess the song.

It's harder than it looks, but, as I just noted, I'm pretty good at nonsense. I spent about twenty minutes on it, and, on first glance, I was sure of 31 of the 50. When I spent a little time thinking about it, I came up with ideas about another 6 or 7, which as luck would have it, turned out to be mostly right.

Let me know how you do.

It's not The Mall, it's just a mall

Most of the time, I really like where I live, generally speaking. I mean, I'd like a bigger apartment, and I'd like to own it rather than rent, but it's a pretty nice place, my commute is reasonable, and it's convenient to just about everything -- especially the mall.

Sometimes, however, the mall is more trouble than it's worth. And no, I'm not talking about Christmas -- because around Christmas, people are generally on a mission, and, as a result, move through the mall with some kind of logic and purpose. Nope. The real problem is this time of year, from about mid-March to mid-April where the mall is filled to capacity with teens (and pre-teens) on various school trips.

In the mall, teenagers mostly just hang out and talk and giggle. And they pay absolutely no attention to their surroundings, which often includes commuters trying to get around them in order to get home. So, every day, I have to carefully navigate my way through a bunch of kids in matching t-shirts standing in clusters between the escalator and either the video game store or the candy store.

I want to push them out of my way, but, sadly, most of them are bigger than me.

Today, I came to a realization, though: I should cut the kids some slack. I was probably just as annoying as a teenager, and I know with certainty that I spent a lot of my leisure time in malls. (Okay, most. Whatever.)

More importantly, the annoying blocking traffic thing? It's not really the kids' fault.

See, in the midst of being caught in a larger than usual traffic jam right in front of the escalator, I concluded that the blame really lies with the chaperones -- the adults that, under the guise of being responsible, let a large group of teenagers loose on the mall with instructions to meet back at a certain place and certain time. Generally, that place is either right in front of the escalator that leads to Metro or right by the front entrance.

Time after time, these adults do this without ever entertaining the notion that their large group might wind up impeding traffic. And once their group is assembled, the adults generally don't notice -- or don't care -- that they're in the way. And, in the very unusual circumstance when they do become aware that they're blocking the way, they don't/can't/won't do anything to fix the situation -- like perhaps moving their group closer to one side or the other.

These are the people that you send your kids on field trips with, America. They're not even smart enough to get out of the way.

To-do list

I know I said I wouldn't ignore this blog, but life has a way of interfering. I've been trying to get everything at home in order before the cleaning lady comes this week. Which means that I am finally going to put my pile of clean laundry away. And go through my mail from the past eight weeks, which is mostly catalogs and condolence cards. And then maybe, just maybe, I'll get to my taxes this weekend, before the fantasy baseball drafts.

I'm not faring as well with the getting organized at work. I meant to start going through my mail at lunch today, but instead, I made a fillable NIT bracket for the PH4H NIT Pick-'em. And I know I'll be doing it again tomorrow for the Women's bracket. But maybe I'll get to it on Wednesday.

Chaos

The end result of my being out of town for so long is that I still have piles of stuff to go through and put away. Mostly, now, in the apartment, it's piles of mail and piles of laundry. (In the office, it's just mail.)

I saw this article the other day, and I have to admit that I'm just a tad jealous. I wish I could have someone come in and reorganize my clutter. If I actually buy a place, I should probably incorporate these suggestions.

Game theory

At work, I'm taking this negotiation skills workshop that involves all sorts of little role-playing exercises. One involved a variation on game theory -- two teams are at war with each other, you both have 100 missiles, and can either try to annihilate each other or work something out.

My first instinct was total and complete annihilation. I think that's always my starting point.

My team was more open-minded. The majority decided that we should start destroying our own missiles as a sign of goodwill. In the back of my mind, the entire time, I was convinced that the other side was just lulling us into complacency. The prisoner's dilemma, yadda yadda yadda.

I was wrong. Surprisingly, my coworkers -- all lawyers -- are honorable people, people of their word, and both sides managed to negotiate a solution where there was no loss of life, and an almost complete destruction of both arsenals. Win-win.

I keep coming back to the same thought, though: If I had been allowed to follow my instincts, I would have caused World War III. Clearly this means that I need to work on some trust issues. For the greater good.

Couch-to-10K

Remember when I said I was going to do Couch-to-10K? Well, check this out.

I promise I won't ignore this place, though.

Trial, day 21 -- a look back

So, we finally finished the trial today, and I got to drive back from Newark with a car full of boxes. But now the fun (read: briefing) begins.

But let's focus on other things for a minute. Like how different things are now, versus where they were on January 15:

• When this trial began, it was the beginning of winter. Now it's almost Spring.
• When this trial began, Mitt Romney looked like a viable candidate, and Hillary Clinton was the Democratic front-runner. Back then, the Republicans were playing attack ads, and the Democrats were playing nice. Now John McCain has the Republican nomination sewn up, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are fighting it out for the Democratic nomination.
• Since this trial began, I have had two changes to my salary, and I got a new boss. (actually my boss's boss's boss, but who's counting?)
• When this trial began, I hadn't stayed in a Hilton in the better part of a year. Now I have either gold or silver Hilton Honors status.
• When this trial began, I only knew of two good restaurants in Newark. Now I could direct people to at least six. (Unfortunately, five of them have very similar Portuguese food.)
• Since this trial began, I have eaten more M&M cookies than I could count -- more than any time since my childhood.
• Since this trial began, I have been to the gym approximately four times.
• When this trial began, I was eight pounds lighter, and one dress size smaller.
• When this trial began, I had two parents and two grandmothers. Now I only have one of each.

Fun Facts

1. While in Houston this weekend, I went to the Rodeo. (Well, to the livestock show and carnival part at least.) We rode the giant ferris wheel, which was named "La Grande Wheel." More importantly, baby cows and goats are cute.
2. I wore the black and gold dress, option #1, to the wedding. It was not as cute as I would have liked, probably because I drank too many margaritas at the rehearsal dinner the night before. But the casual dress I wore to the rehearsal dinner was really cute and totally fit with the Tex-Mex theme.
3. I am back in Newark, but only for a day. The hotel cookies seemed to be chocolate chunk, but I did not investigate closely, as I am trying to be good. Especially now that I've made a bet with my dad that if he could lose 20 pounds by Father's Day, so could I. So, to win, when I get back to D.C., I'm going to start the "Couch to 10K" running plan that everyone says is so great.

Four weeks

Four weeks ago my mother died. Four weeks. Sometimes, it seems like it was so much longer ago than that -- and other times it feels like it was just yesterday. And then there are the times when it just feels like she's away on a long vacation, somewhere where I can't reach her on the phone -- and then I remember.

I wish she was here. She'd tell me which dress to wear on Saturday.

The Sanitization of Wikipedia

I didn't mean to blog about Project Runway. I meant to blog about Wikipedia. Specifically, this article I read about, how, for some reason, Wikipedia seems to have a hair trigger on sanitizing entries about our Dear President, but how the same heavy hand is not being used to edit the entries about certain ex-Presidents.

Here's the main point of the article:

For example, Wikipedia's main Bill Clinton article manages to mention every single fringe right-wing nutcase allegation ever made against the 42nd president.

By contrast, the main Wikipedia article on George W. Bush has been carefully sanitized. It clearly aims to present Bush in the most favorable light possible. Frankly, the Bush article looks like a love letter from Karl Rove.

Now, don't get me wrong: I like Wikipedia. A lot. I've said as much before. But I also understand that the whole wiki- thing can be used (or perhaps abused) to specific advantages, as long as there's someone out there being vigilant enough. So I guess the moral of the story is that you need to check alternative sources -- or the footnotes to the Wikipedia article -- before you rely on Wikipedia as gospel.

But what I really got out of the article is this:

If Wikipedia was free of bias, one might think that the main Bush article would include at least a mention of the Margie Schoedinger sexual assault allegation against Bush.

And just who is Margie Schoedinger?

She was a 38-year-old Texas woman who filed a sexual assault lawsuit against George W. Bush in December 2002.

Oh, and there's one other interesting detail: the next year, Schoedinger was found dead of a gunshot wound.

***

But instead, the Schoedinger case was completely ignored by the U.S. media, with the sole exception of the small local Texas newspaper (The Fort Bend Star) that originally reported the story. Her case remains extremely obscure. To this day, very few people have ever heard of her.

Now that's something I never heard before. Why the heck do we have a free press in this country if they're not covering this kind of thing?

Thoughts on Project Runway

Okay, so I am totally not surprised that Christian (Annapolis's own!) won Project Runway. Watching his collection go down the runway was like watching a living, breathing work of art. It was, for lack of a better word, fierce.

But there was absolutely nothing wearable in it. So, ultimately, I think I would have voted for Rami. I mean, at least I could wear one of his dresses to the wedding this weekend.

M&Ms and OCD

I've never been shy about my OCD. Admittedly, it's never been formally diagnosed, but it's one of those things where I know it, and pretty much everyone who knows me knows it -- and as long as it's not posing a risk to me or anyone else, what's the point of getting a doctor's confirmation?

Today, in his chat, Gene Weingarten had a poll asking people to choose their favorite candy from the following choices: Tootsie Rolls, Hershey's Kisses, Milk Duds, Raisinets, M&Ms.

I chose M&M's. (Raisinets would be my least favorite, but only slightly more so than Milk Duds.) I didn't even have to think about it. I love M&Ms. Particularly peanut M&Ms.

Then I read this:

Savannah, Ga. by way of Washington, D.C.: M&M's are clearly the superior candy. Not only are they delicious, but if you're even mildly OCD they can provide good entertainment. I like to eat the green ones first.

Gene Weingarten: You are the third OCD person who has expressed an affinity for m&ms in part because of their sortability.

I find this impossibly... odd.

Hmmm. Could it be that my love of M&Ms has something to do with how I love to put them into piles? So, I decided to do a little experiment. Here, in full color, is a slideshow of how I like to eat M&Ms:



























I kid you not: This is what I do with every single package of M&Ms, every single time. (Well, to the extent that "every single time" means "whenever I have the opportunity to take them out of the package and inspect/organize them first.")

Still, I can't help but feeling that the craziest thing about this is that I took the time to take the pictures.

This one's for the girls in the audience

The downside of being away from home for so long -- not to mention all the late nights spent doing trial prep -- was that I wasn't really paying attention to my diet, or spending a lot of time at the gym, for that matter. So, I've gained about 8 pounds since Thanksgiving. Which, when you're about 5'1", is about a dress size.

Of course this poses a problem: I have a black tie wedding to go to next weekend, and the pretty Nanette Lepore dress that I bought is no longer going to fit me.

So, here are my choices:

1. Wear the dress I wore to the inaugural ball in January, 2005. (Quilted satin, mostly black with gold squares.) Pro: It closes, and it doesn't look that bad. Plus it's not as overwhelming as my other ball gown. Con: It doesn't fit that well -- it's not quite the right proportion because it is not a petite. And it has uncomfortable boning in the seams. And it's sleeveless. And you can see my tattoo. And it needs to be dry cleaned.
2. Wear the dress I wore to my sister's wedding in May, 2004. (Iridescent light green chiffon with beaded straps.) Pro: It's green and very pretty. Con: It's very sheer and lightweight and hard to match shoes and accessories to. And you can see my tattoo.
3. Wear the grey empire waist dress that I wore on a cruise with my parents in May, 1999. (Grey velvet embroidered top, grey chiffon bottom.) Pro: It is a beautiful dress. And I can wear a bra with it. Con: It squishes my boobs down. And you can see part of my tattoo.
4. Wear the navy blue dress I wore on that same cruise with my parents. (Navy blue velvet top, midnight blue chiffon skirt, cowl back.) Pro: It fits really well. Con: The zipper won't lie flat. And you can see part, if not all, of my tattoo.
5. Wear the bridesmaid's dress from Nicole's wedding. (Navy blue satin two piece with low v-back and subtle beading at the empire waist.) Pro: It fits really well. I can wear a bra with it. And it has a matching wrap that I can use to cover up my tattoo. Con: It looks like a bridesmaid dress, which is somewhat inappropriate.
6. Wear the black dress I wore to the law firm's office Christmas party in 2006. (Black chiffon, beading at waist, low cut.) Pro: It is a gorgeous dress and fits me well. Plus it's black, which means that I can find a wrap to wear easily. Con: It's black -- I'd rather wear something with color. Oh, and without a wrap, you can see my tattoo.
7. Figure out a way to lose the better part of ten pounds by Saturday. Pro: My beautiful new Nanette Lepore dress would fit. As would some other options. Con: You'd probably still see my tattoo. And I'd probably make myself sick. Oh, and it's not likely to happen.
8. Try to find a new dress. Pro: I get a new dress. Con: I have to buy a new dress when I have tons of dresses in my closet. And I'd have to go shopping, when I'm already stressed enough.

What to do, what to do?

Update: I added links to pictures of the dresses in question. Let me know what you think.

Trial, day 19 -- with cookies

My mom was not a baker. Every once in a while, she'd play along when I wanted to bake something, but it was not something she particularly enjoyed doing.

One year, I got an Easy-Bake oven as a birthday gift, and my mother was actually perplexed when I wanted to use it. She told me that it made no sense, trying to bake little mini cakes on a lightbulb. After one or two uses, the toy mysteriously disappeared. So if I wanted to bake something, I'd have to resort to looking up the recipe in my dad's well-worn copy of "The Joy of Cooking" and using the real oven.

When the subject of baking came up, she would tell the story about how, for one of my birthdays, she labored over frosting a Bert and Ernie cake for an ungodly amount of time. The cake was, indeed, beautiful. But she always left out the part where the cake itself was made from a mix, and how the beautiful frosting tasted exactly like food coloring.

When the other kids' moms brought in cupcakes for their birthdays, I was excited. I love cupcakes. But when it was my turn, I begged and pleaded for Munchkins. Trust me, it was safer -- and better.

Then there was one time, in 7th grade, when I had to make some kind of dessert for a school project, and do a demonstration of how it was made. She actually had me make rum balls. I got in trouble. She thought it was funny. In retrospect, I'm surprised that I didn't get suspended.

In all honesty, there were a couple of things she baked well. Cream puffs and cannoli were her specialties. Actually, now that I think about it, I think she used pre-baked shells for the cannoli, and just made the filling. For her kids, she made really good M&M cookies -- mostly because the recipe was on the back of the package and it's pretty much foolproof.

Anyway, one of the best things about this hotel is that, every day, it puts out cookies for the guests. More often than not, they're chocolate chip, or chocolate with white chips. Sometimes they're coconut or peanut butter or white chocolate cherry. Today they were M&M cookies -- just like my mom's.



The M&M cookies are still my favorite.

Trial, Day 18

Day 18. In Newark.

I have nothing more to say.

Trial, Day 17

We've had seventeen days of trial -- and it's not over yet! There are at least three more days of testimony -- more likely four -- and then a day for closing arguments.

More importantly, I've been away from my apartment -- and my life, such as it is -- for the better part of seven weeks.

I am sick of room service. I am sick of the three or four decent restaurants that we can walk to for dinner. I am sick of the three or four places that we get lunch from. I am sick of Newark.

Really, I am just going stir-crazy.

I want to go home.

Trial, Day 16

You know what would totally suck? Having to come back to Newark to finish up the trial in March.

Oh, wait. That's not a joke.

Photo Essay

This is what it looked like out of the window of the New Jersey Transit, between 11:30 a.m. and 12:05 p.m. today:

Alone

Today was the first day I spent entirely by myself since my mom died. And I spent it in a hotel in Newark.

I could have gone back to my apartment for the weekend and relied on my friends to distract me. I could have gone down to my Uncle's house. I could have gone into Manhattan and been distracted there, either by shopping or by seeing friends or family. Heck, I could have gone to a hockey game here in Newark. But instead, I chose to have a quiet day of sleep, work, and tv here in the hotel.

I think the solace is good for me. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

Snow Day!

I grew up not too far from the hotel in which I am currently staying. During the winter, almost every night I would go to sleep hoping and praying for a snow storm big enough to cancel -- or at least delay -- school.

Last night, I was hoping against hope that the predicted storm would be small enough that court wouldn't be cancelled. I just want the case to get over with already.

But that was not to be. It's snowing pretty hard here:

Trial, Day 15

Today was a late morning, so I got to sleep in. I am still tired. I am still coughing. Newark is still cold. And it's probably going to snow tomorrow.

Nothing changes. Every once in a while, I think that everything is normal. And then I remember otherwise.

A message

Oh, and I've been neglecting one really important thing: I need to thank everyone who has stopped by this blog over the past two weeks and has left me words of support, encouragement, condolence, and/or compassion. I am pretty sure that I wouldn't have made it through the past two weeks without it.

I am amazed and awed by each and every single one of you, my friends.

Trial, Day 14

Well, we had more trial today. And then we had dinner. Boy, did we have dinner. We went to a Portugese/Brazilian restaurant, where several of us had the rodizio -- where they bring out giant skewers of meat and keep cutting pieces off until you beg them to stop.

One of my coworkers then told me that he can find this blog by googling my name, and that maybe I shouldn't write specific details about the trial anymore, just in case.

My first reaction was that's probably a good thing, because it's not like anyone really wants to read about my work anyway. But then I got curious. So, once I got back to the hotel, I was on a mission -- I googled my name in an attempt to figure out whether you could find the blog through my name.

Turns out, I couldn't. Especially not when I googled my first and last names, as anyone who knows me would likely do. In fact, I didn't find the blog until I googled the words "Dara" and "blog" -- and even then, it was on the second page of the results.

So, I'm safe for now. But who knows -- tomorrow, I might very well ignore the work stuff and post about Lost. It's more interesting anyway.

Trial, Day 13

Yesterday afternoon, on the train up, I kept thinking about how young and innocent and naïve I was when this goddamn trial started. Back when I thought the universe was a rational place, with a logic -- and, for lack of a better word, sanity.

I have been disabused of such notions. Nothing makes sense anymore.

Today, the trial started up once again -- and I am sick, once again. The judge was clearly feeling badly for me, so, after I had a particularly nasty bout of coughing, she kept offering me cough drops. It wasn't until later in the day that she made it clear that she knew about my mom when she called me up to a sidebar to ask a question. She then followed up with an offer of more cough drops, and told me that if I wasn't feeling well, her courtroom deputy had an office with a couch that I could go lie down on.

And that's when I remembered, once again, that I had entered the twilight zone.

The sweater

When I was a kid, my mom had this sweater that she used to wear around the house. Nothing special, just an oversized ivory cardigan with brown buttons and two pockets. But she wore it almost every day.

It was from Bamberger's. I know this, because, the other day, I found it, on the floor of her closet, tucked in a corner. It was dirty, one of the buttons was loose, and one of the pockets was torn.

I took the sweater -- not in a surreptitious way, unlike, say, how I acquired my dad's army jacket. Instead, I walked out of the closet holding the dirty old thing and boldly announced to my father and my sister and my brother that, if no one had any objections, I was taking it.

My dad and brother looked at me as if I were crazy. My sister asked to see the sweater and, after I handed it to her, she held it for a minute or two, quietly inspecting it. Equally quietly, she announced that it was torn, and folded it up and put it on the couch next to her. When she left to go back to her house for the evening, the sweater was still there.

Leaving it like that was clearly an act of consent.

Last night, upon arriving home, I washed the sweater and then sat on the couch, mending it. It made me feel just a little closer -- a little better.

Silence

I am currently sitting in my parents' house, alone. Actually, I am sitting in my dad's house, alone. That small change in sentence structure is so gigantic, and is so unlike anything I have ever known, anything I could possibly convey to anyone who hasn't already been through something similar.

It's like the earth all of a sudden spun off its axis. Like the ground suddenly shifted from under my feet.

Seismic. That's the word my sister and I keep using.

I cried a lot on the airplane on the way down. I couldn't read, couldn't listen to music, and, thanks to the TSA, couldn't really pace up and down the airplane. So I cried and wrote in a journal. When I told my brother and dad about it, they concluded that the people sitting next to me must have thought I was schizophrenic.

The next couple of days were a blur. There were the arrangements, and then the funeral, and then the sitting shiva. My brother described it as, "Sorry about your mom. Have some mayo." I would replace the word "mayo" with "babka," but it's close enough. I don't really remember most of it, which is probably a blessing in disguise. I kept my notes from my speech at the funeral, but I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to muster up the strength to look at it.

There are little things I think about that I never really considered before. Like how the last meal I ate with my mom was in a Denny's. And the last time I kissed her was in front of the Palm Beach International airport. And how the last conversation we had was about a Catherine Malandrino dress and the Giants winning the Superbowl. And the last Thanksgiving, the last birthday present, that kind of stuff, the stuff that I would do over again if I knew it was supposed to last a lifetime.

I think, most of all, that's what I'm going to take away from this whole crazy thing.

Speechless

There are some words I never in a million years thought I'd have to hear or to say -- or even write. Some things just don't happen. But at 3:40, when I heard my cell phone ringing in the other room, I knew I was about to hear something that would change my life forever. I mean, who's dad calls at 3:40 am on a Thursday unless the most horrible, unthinkable thing has happened?

I can't type the words. It makes it real.

I then had to call my brother and tell him. He answered the phone and I said, "Please don't make me say it out loud."

I then called my sister, who had to tell my Nana. They're on their way to the hospital by now. I sat down on the floor and hyperventilated, until the phone rang again.

I have to figure out how to get myself to Florida -- not to mention how to function on a very, very basic level.

Yet another family crisis

Monday night I had a really hard time sleeping. All night, I tossed and turned, having these incredibly weird dreams about my mom, of all people. When I finally managed to drag my butt out of bed Tuesday morning, I dismissed it as the product of an overworked and overtired brain, as any rational person would.

As luck would have it, my mom was really sick Monday night/Tuesday morning.* She ignored it and managed to get through most of the day, but Tuesday evening, she checked herself into the hospital. And no one told us kids. My sister lives 20 minutes away, and no one bothered to call her. The only reason we found out about it at all was because my brother called my Nana, where he found out about this and the fact that my Nana all but totaled her car on Friday. (I already knew about the car accident.)

Clearly, this is not a good year for my family.

I spent most of the day trying to find out from someone -- anyone -- what the hell was going on. No one was answering the house phone or my mother's cell phone, and my dad's cell phone went straight to voicemail -- which means that it wasn't on or wasn't charged. Go figure. So when I got home, I called my sister, who didn't even know my mom was sick, and I sent her into a panic. And then I called my Nana, who only knew the vaguest of information.

Eventually, my sister and I -- separately -- managed to get to talk to our father. (And then to each other, to our brother, and to Nana.) Turns out that my mom has some kind of infection and is septic. And now she's having complications -- she's having difficulty breathing, her kidneys aren't working, and her blood pressure is really low. And she's a diabetic who is allergic to a whole bunch of medicines.

I don't know anything about medicine, but I know this is bad -- and the doctors have pretty much confirmed my worst fears.

My entire family seems to understand the scope, but we all process it differently, I guess. Apart from failing to communicate with his children, my dad complained about how my mother was complaining, and about how she seemed so much better in the morning, before he left her to go to work. And then he decided that he would go to sleep early so he can deal with things tomorrow, with a clear head.

My brother, the baby of the family, is in some kind of denial, saying that, after the past couple of months, the fates "owe us one." My Nana is understandably worried about her eldest child.

My sister is a wreck. She called me to cry -- and I wasn't having any of it. In no uncertain terms, I told her to stop, that she could fall apart when it's over, but for now, she has to be a grown-up. She says she's not strong enough -- I told her that's bullshit -- people manage to get through what they need to get through, piece by piece, little by little. We're all worried and sad and scared about mom, but everyone else can't spend their limited energy making her feel better about it. She needs to find that strength for herself.

As for me, I'm listening to the rain pound against my window, and checking on flights to Florida for the weekend. I'm still kind of hoping to go next month, under better circumstances. But I'll decide tomorrow.


*This is not the first time such a thing has happened in my family. Half my life ago, when I was sixteen, my mom was scheduled to have foot surgery -- and I was really excited about getting to drive her car around while she recovered. But when she went to have the surgery, she had a panic attack when they tried to give her the anesthetic. Turns out, my Pop - her dad - was in the process of having emergency bypass surgery.

Reflections on Super Tuesday

I watched the Super Tuesday returns come in last night with the same feeling I've had for weeks -- internal conflict resulting from my likely choice of candidate in the upcoming Democratic primary. Since that blog entry, every other member of my family that has voted in the Democratic primary in their respective states has voted for Hillary Clinton.* And I totally understand why. (I'd probably only find it really puzzling if one of them suddenly voted for Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, or this guy.)

Today, via email, I had a conversation about the candidates with a friend, someone who seems to reach similar decisions to me but approaches pretty much everything in a very different way. She asked me if it was an easy decision.

On the one hand, it's sort-of funny because I'm not 100% decided -- and I probably won't be until I actually get in the box and touch the screen. But that's academic, since I've been saying that I'm leaning towards Obama for several weeks now. So my response was more serious/less pithy:

It hasn't been easy at all. On day one, I've was about 51-49 in favor of Obama. (Actually it was about 35-33-32 Obama-Edwards-Clinton, until I figured that Edwards wasn't really a viable candidate.) Then [Rabid Hillary supporter's] emails pushed me further into Obama territory. But [Obama Fans'] constant [commenting] about him has pushed me slightly in the other direction, not to mention Hillary's impressive performance on Letterman the other night.

Ignoring for a second the whole feminism/post-feminism aspect of the debate, ultimately, I've sort-of concluded that I like Obama's optimism and the fact that he symbolizes a complete change from the status quo, which is enough to overcome the fact that she actually seems to represent a slightly more left-of-center liberalism. But I will happily support either one of them in the general election, and I get very annoyed whenever other Democrats go around bashing either one of them.

I mean that. I get frustrated whenever I see supporters of either Democratic candidate bashing the other one. It's silly and unproductive -- and in the general election, will be turned around and used against whichever candidate ultimately prevails.


*An aside: My dad joked that he voted for John McCain -- but no one in my family has voted Republican in years, and my dad wouldn't be the first to cross the party line. (Although I am sure that if he was voting for a Republican in Florida, it would have been McCain or Giuliani -- and not Romney or Huckabee.) So then he admitted that he voted for Hillary because he and my mom don't think that a black candidate can win in this country, not yet. Of course, I then pointed out that if some people can't bring themselves to vote for a black man, what makes him think those same people would vote for a woman. So then he said that the Democrats would undoubtedly lose either way in November. Not very optimistic, right?