It’s only started to occur to me very recently how I deal with pain, loss and grief. Every time I say goodbye to someone or someplace which means a lot to me, I die a little inside, and it erodes a bit of what makes me who I am. As antisocial as I am in most respects, I do get tied to good people very easily. It really would rip my heart out every time I had to leave someone behind and move on to the next stage of my life, as I will always have to do, being human and all. Loss and grief are merely realities that everyone has to deal with in the unfair game of life.

But I think I’m starting to realize that I’ve never really dealt with it. It’s trite and cliche, but I have never properly learned how to let go of people and places to which I’ve been close and emotionally invested. Like much of my behavior, from career direction to investment ideas, I take the safe route, avoiding big risks, and avoiding any undue loss. The main reason is that I have never faced real life- threatening (or at least livelihood- threatening) adversity, and thus never properly learned how to deal with loss, having had so little. When someone I love dies or when I move away from people to whom I’m attached (or when they must move away from me), I universally deal with it by subconsciously pretending that nothing has changed except perhaps the frequency of my exposure to those people. I will verbally acknowledge that my Grandmother is dead - I saw her body on the hospital bed only moments after she died. But by failing to really register the fact that I will never see her again, instead preferring to fantasize that I just can’t see her due to distance, schedules or other interfering phenomena, I’m spared entirely the grieving process. Rather than thinking they’ve moved on to a different plain of existence, I think they merely moved on and I lost their address.

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I was admitted to the SFSU Graduate Business school. It’s really happening. I’m really going back now… [Of course, by the time fall semester rolled around we'd decided to move to Charlotte so I never actually enrolled.]

So just in case I don’t get another update in this month, I can officially declare that I made good on my goal to update ‘more than once’ in May…

Where on Earth is this darned year going? Before I know it it’ll be time to start planning our trip to the East Coast for Thanksgiving. In the mean time, we just booked our weekend in Maui to be present for my sister’s wedding, coming up at the end of summer… Not an interesting flight, I’m sure, but it should be nice to have some excuse to visit a state I otherwise just assumed I’d skip on the checklist.

What is it about guys in bands? Even the ones who I’d find hideously boring in any other context make me flutter when they’re holding an instrument… Must be some guitar-phallus connection… Not that the Athena boys wouldn’t give me a stir with or without the axes.

And finally, why is it that every city on earth seems to have a better music scene than San Francisco? I miss Fresno these days, especially when I’m in the mood for a local live show by some bad band I’ve never heard of (or even a good but horribly unpopular one I have heard of), and then I remember that SF doesn’t allow those.