well hey

dude, ok so catch up time...

the last time i wrote substantially i was getting ready for a mega road trip and mega road trip i did... check out the pictures page link in the right margin for the grand synopsis... basically it involved hanging out with colleen's minnesota people for a bit, hanging around valpo for a bit, and hanging around my pittsburgh relatives for a bit with quick visits to a few other spiffy friends on the way... as soon as i got into town i had a visitor too (mason)

pretty insane... as i commented one night to scott and colleen (both of whom travelled with me), i like moving every few years since it gives me license to kinda start over with a new personality of sorts each time... at the time i said that, i commented "and right now i'm definitely being valpo lara... enjoy it while it lasts!"... it's funny b/c they've already met one of my high school friends... now they met extended family, and saw me in the context of valpo people and in the context of budapest semesters people... not that i'm like schizophrenic or anything, but i notice subtle changes in how i act each place... it's like i switch over to the mode that matches most of the people i'm dealing with at the time and the others can just get confused... it's fun to see so many people, also takes a lot of energy -- i've been running on adrenaline all week i think. =P

can't believe i'll be in classes in just 3 days from now (2?... whatever tuesday counts as)... after getting in yesterday afternoon i've just nearly finished unpacking... it's been a bit crazy... part of that was hanging w/ mason and other people when i normally would have been organizing my life, but part is just a LOT of stuff to do... i guess it's good amanda doesn't get back here til tomorrow because i've been keeping weird hours (up chatting w/ mason til 4:30 this morning... still up now at 2 blasting stereo and moving stuff around the place) and had my stuff spread out everywhere as i sort through it all...

speaking of amanda, it's been in the back of my mind for quite some time, but i really have no clue what she thinks of me... not that her opinion would make or break my opinion of myself because i don't think either of us knows the other well at all... i think we do relatively well trying to respect the way each other does things, but i also know that we just come from totally different backgrounds and i think even if we suddenly decided to put in this gigantic effort to get to know each other better it would be a real challenge just because we're so different...

anyhow, i had left her a message wednesday that i would be home friday, hope she had a good break, and that one of my friends needed a place to stay friday and hopefully that's ok... call me if she needed to talk about it... pretty much all i could do from the road 3 states away! anywho, i come home to an answering machine message back that she was around friday morning/afternoon and left before i got home, planning to be back sunday and also would i please keep the heat down low so we don't have a mega electric bill this month...

who knows... sometimes i just get the feeling that she feels like i'm an inane slob... although i thrive on clutter, i thrive on organized clutter and i keep the clutter in my room, and keep the common area pretty free of my stuff... i know i'm not a slob because in my other apartment situations (budapest, valpo, etc.) i cleaned as frequently as my roommates in one case and was the primary cleaner in the other... i don't mean to sound paranoid because i'm not really... i just wish i knew if my guess what right... it's the first time in awhile i've lived with someone that i talk to with such little frequency just by schedules and by habit both ways that i feel some days like i'm walking on glass and i'm not even sure that that's the case.

this is getting way too rambly... moving right along...

so break and driving were great for thinking about things... nicole's been gone already 4.5 months now and she's still on my mind just about every day, if not more often... it's the first time i actually put it in words for myself over break but although she was still one of my closest friends in the past year, i felt a little like we were growing distant (bad word choice for lack of a better one) since i got back from europe... i don't think it was so much a function of that as a function of both of us preparing to part ways and move on to new lives... we definitely did have some spiffy chats over the past year and she was the one person who called me on my birthday while i was home this summer, and we wrote back and forth a bit, but it's completely weird to me that i think i would have reacted extremely differently to her death if we hadn't had the last conversation we did 2 days before she went... that still replays in my head, a LOT... this paragraph doesn't sound that significant or really say what i want it to, except to me, but i've been sorting through a lot of my reaction to nicole's death over break now that i've had time to sit still.

it was also good over break to run into other people like the duncansons or christi mccrory (nee neuf) (stephen duncanson, age 12, died like a week after nicole... christi mccrory's dad died unexpectedly when he crashed a plane he was taking lessons to fly earlier this fall)... in some ways some of the many situations that have been on my mind for months felt a little more rested when i could see and talk to the people affected face to face... not that the hurt/loss is any less for anyone... just a little comfort in actually seeing people.

i still have no idea how i feel exactly about grandma schumann/fischer... thursday, while we were in pittsburgh, i drove colleen and scott up to her nursing home and i visited with her... it was my first time to go see her without mom, so that was really different. i commented after thanksgiving that her mind was noticeably slipping... it's just small things... but things that wouldn't have been the case before... she recognized me, was excited to see me, wanted to see my picture albums from the holidays, had fun comments, and laughed a lot at my jokes, but some things (like she was incredibly excited to hear that scott was from wisconsin, her home state and after talking about wisconsin for a bit, she asked at least twice more where my friends were from and was completely excited again, not remembering she had heard it before, when i said wisconsin again) it's little things like that that make it a little harder... she's the grandparent i've grown to know most as a friend... both my grandpas died when i was 15... that's old enough to have lots of good memories with them, but not quite adult enough mentality to see them as a friend instead of a fun older relative... grandma pudwell's viewpoints make her extremely hard for me to relate to and so i feel like i put up a really weird facade when i'm with her... grandma schumann/fischer though wrote me letters all the time until her strokes... she was always interested (and still is) in all of what i'm up to.... academically, socially, spiritually... isn't critical, but is someone whose opinions i respect a lot... that unique relationship out of the 4 grandparents makes it really hard to see her less and less able to communicate, because even when she does have a sentence or paragraph long thought to communicate, her strokes and being half paralyzed make it really hard for her to express enough words clearly to get the whole thing across... we've gotten good at understanding her over the years as best we can, but it's still a challenge... and hard to see her kinda trapped inside a half frozen body unable to even completely express herself verbally much less do anything much to occupy her time... you think after awhile it would become easier to know how to deal with, and i guess over the past 3.5 years we have acclimated to the situation, as has she, but that doesn't mean its easy... done rambling about that... just having my first visit with *just* me and her got me to thinking... i miss hearing out her full comments and talking with her more at length... i miss getting letters from her when we're not in the same place... and yet she's not gone yet... it's this weird in-between phase that i don't think anyone is fully emotionally equipped to handle...

on the other hand, grandma pudwell just makes me mad sometimes... she tells me how proud she is of me and that i deserve all the things i have going for me, and then she lights into me and lectures me about all sorts of crazy things... the topic of this visit was "lara, if you ever even think of dating someone who is not white, you won't be allowed in my house -- it's for your own good... i'm 78, you should agree with me just because i'm older"... and even though non-argument visits are nice, i never just verbally agree with her if it means saying something i totally don't agree with, so i respectfully gave all kinds of examples where mixed marriages have worked out just fine (dude what would she say if she knew mom (her daughter in law) had a black boyfriend for a little in college??? -- dude...) and she got all upset with me... it also bothers me when she tells me "oh you work so hard, you deserve your nice new car and this and that and blah blah blah"... i dunno why, i guess deserve is one of my little buzz words that sets me ill at ease... i don't think i *deserve* anything i have... i think i'm blessed to have what i do and need to work on being more generous/sharing with what i do have instead of hoarding it... it's good to visit grandma and i do enjoy it, but it's generally a stressful thing to see her because she has this knack for inadvertently pushing my buttons as illustrated above... i dunno...

still going... dude... so yeah, if i plan to wake up in 6 hours i should maybe get some sleep... those are my rambling thoughts on several relationships that have been on my mind lately and got brought up again on the journey back here to jersey... there's much more i could write about... mostly the drive was good for thinking and sorting through stuff...

it's good to be back... i just pray it all gets off to a good running start instead of the avalanche that last semester started with. =P

really, no joke, sleep time... good night to all y'all.