11/23/2006

11/23/2006: my first thanksgiving away from my own family. my first thanksgiving as part of a new family. my first thanksgiving as half of my own family. do please note the date.

in the shower this morning, i thought:

christmastime is drawing near
but november is my time of year
from distant places a family converges
and all 'round the feast, what matters, emerges

I bungled my departing line, which I had devised the night before. I told 203s parents that I had never before felt so welcome in someone else's home (though rictor/veg's parents run a close second) and that they (203's parents) deserve either my thanks or an award for such fine acting. i said "reward" rather than "award", which kinda changes the whole meaning, but i think they got me. they may not know that i'm a writer and not a stand up comedian. or maybe they didn't not know that -- i find that i have little trouble making them laugh. laughter, in that family, is a heritable trait.

lots of things happened over my TG break. lots of events and details and so forth. but more importantly, impressions were made. guesses were confirmed. paths were glimpsed.

my dad has imparted two great pieces of relationship advice to me:
1) you marry the family, not just the woman
2) why buy the cow when you're getting the milk for free?

in regards to the latter, i am a failure. i bought the cow before i'd even had a full gallon of milk.

i didn't want to walk away two evenings ago in flagstaff airport, but i did, and it wasn't the worst of our partings. when i got home i deleted the visitation counter, because our next visit will not involve a parting, and i changed the caption of the other counter to better reflect the impending breakdown of my life.

one of my favorite sci-fi stories involved black holes (aka singularities). i do not remember the name of the story but odds are good that it was written by david brin. in the story, it is theorized that the "other end" of a black hole becomes a new universe when "this end" of the black hole collapses. in our universe, the hole sucks in matter until the event horizon collapses, and, like a drop of water falling from a faucet, the pocket of universe becomes self-contained, exploding (unlike a drop of water falling from a faucet) in its own Big Bang to a new creation.

that is what will happen to my life in 18 days: implosion followed by a new Creation. nobody knows what is inside a black hole because by their very nature, information cannot pass out of a singularity. likewise, i cannot see what lies beyond the singularity in my own life that will occur on 12/16/2006, but i knew when i stepped through that "security checkpoint" that i had only 18 more days of this separation nonsense, and that when 5/23/07 rolls around, i'll be marrying the best family i could have hoped for.

things are looking up, and up, and up.

perhaps it's just the music i'm listening to. impressions are more important than events, i think. lessons are more important than teachers.

tomorrow, perhaps, will be a day for events. today i will enjoy music, impressions, and climbing. i will be happy that i spent last week with people that seemed happy and active, and i will be happy that in less than 3 weeks, things will get weird, in the best of ways.