(no subject)

The worst thing about So You Think you Can Dance, even more so than the worry that someone less deserving than Benjy or Doynelle could win, is the fact that any time it's a dance that is at all slinky, all the skinny girls put on mullet dresses (short in the front, long in the back) so all the boys will vote for them on the grounds that they're hot. Thank god for the gay male dance fans with telephones out there is all I can say. Also, keep up the good work.

Something more serious, but also more rambly

A couple of people have been talking about grief and missing people lately, and it has made me think a lot about it, because I think my brain makes them one emotion.

I think that one of the oddest things about the distances--the physical miles--we get between important people in our lives now (vs 100, 150 years ago where you'd often live down the road from your whole family or at most across town) make it harder to really *understand* that when they're dead it's not just that they're not talking to you. I don't miss people and animals that died any extra when I am here, because I have *always* missed them, they have always been missing from my life here. But when I'm at my mom's house, I remember that our dog is dead, and I remember that I can't call my grandfather for a ride somewhere, or walk over and visit them.

For me, that's how grief works. The people (and animals) in my life that have passed on are all physically distant from me. I have long since been accustomed to missing my grandfather. My brother, who lived locally, was very close to him, and very distraught when he died, but for me, when I am not at my mom's house, it just ends up feeling more like he's just not talking to me right now.

One of my very favorite boys in college, when he broke up with my friend, passed along the message (somehow) that he didn't care to stay in contact with any of us. (It has since appeared that this was not actually what he said, but at the time, it's what we believed.) So I couldn't talk to him, couldn't email him, and didn't know how or where or what he was doing. Which is kinda the same way my brain seems to handle the idea that my grandfathers are dead.

I think that a lot of the time this distance is indistinguishable from grief, and it's only when you conciously pay attention to it that you remember. If you are in constant contact with something that reminds you of the things that are missing in your life, you process it more quickly, but the physical distance makes the grieving stretch out longer and longer. And the same is true about missing people to me--I miss former housemates the way I'd miss graduated seniors at college. Every time I go past someone's old room, every time I used to walk past Red Square at K, their loss was very immediate. But when I left them, I'd miss them in a distant, vague manner.

We had christmas this year without my grandfather, and to me it barely felt any different, and it makes me feel like something is wrong with me that some thing so important *didn't* make a difference. But it kinda felt like maybe he was just out of the room most of the time. Hell, even his funeral felt like that, that i'd just missed him going into the back bedroom or something to sit down for a minute. And on the other hand, my youngest brother reminds me very clearly every time I see him that my other grandfather, the one who killed himself, would have loved him, and *that* makes me so sad, even though it's been 10 years, and I didn't grieve for him like this at the time.

Because of the internet and cellphones I am still in close, regular contact with people that I knew in person (my family, friends from HS, College, clarion, DC, cons, etc.) and that I met first (or only) over the internet (the Tamson House mailing list, the OWW, LJ (though most of them I met through other methods. So it doesn't really matter so far as staying in touch with someone if they live in Cambridge or California, it's the same amount of effort.

And at the same time, so far as their absense in my physical life is concerned, they are always missing, whether they're physically in Providence or Philly. And I have other people who I know from the same places who I'm not in regular contact (sometimes not in any sort of contact with). So I become accustomed to a certain level of missing people. If I'm not interacting with them on a regular basis, the missing of them is just a given--it will go up when I'm reminded of them, but usually it's just sort of low key and in the back of my mind and I don't notice it.

I'm not surprised that there is a wide theme of communication from distant and departed peoples in fiction, I'm just surprised that there isn't more of it, I suppose--I don't remember seeing many in my slush, for example. The internet is so big, and reaches so far, why doesn't it reach dead people? My grandmother has the same email account that my grandfather had, for example, so every time CDAcres logs on IM, I get a little bit of a start.