It's been a weekend of myriad moods - swinging ceaselessly from surly to serene and a few more attenuated timbres in between. I guess it's been one of those weekends of large-if-cliched re-realizationsaccessory to "growing up". I think with almost anything of emotional import, the full impact of a situation is far beyond the scope of human temporal linearities - the saddest things are also the most joyful and all that rot about babies crying next to funerals and giving birth astride graves (Beckett's county hospital might not have been up to regulation). It's not possible to process it fully in any one moment and thus a sequence of different notes betwixt the highs and lows cognizable in any event.
There's a girl I used to study with in my 1L year. Despite the total disparities in our ambitions (she's editor of the law review and gearing up for large firm associateship work and I'm still hoping to offer free hugs with every consultation!), we had a lot in common that made me feel a furtive affinity for her. We both had boyfriends out of town and had been paralegals in prior lives, making us kind of estranged from the 1L social scene. She was actually also my extern-predecessor at the prosecutor's office. As happens, we didn't see much of each other in second year. I later realized that this was because her mom had been diagnosed with cancer - first misdiagnosed as ovarian cancer, but later identified as another form. Her mom had it much harder from the start - more adverse reactions, more stops and starts, but I had thought that she was recovering. We both work in the clinic spaces, so she stopped by a few days ago and asked about my mom. I had told her that she'd just had her last treatment and asked about her mom, only to realize that her mom had just died the week before. She is a strong person and handling it exquisitely, but the paralllels are a discomforting reminder that the health and happiness of our loved ones is ultimately subject to the caprices of fate.
The - wait, what happened? - effect followed me through the week. There's an odd disconnect when you realize the impactful events that have happened in the lives of those you know. I think it's one of the vertigo-inducing parts of growing up: realizing that the close friends that you've had in your adult life (as contrasted to the petulant and often Machiavellian bff-ships of childhood) are now your "old friends" and no matter how enduring your affinity for them, they are not the active components of your life you once suspected they'd always be. I've also realized that *three* friends I have shared deep history with have gotten divorces in the past year and I wasn't there for them and wasn't even aware. It's just kind of a dizzing feeling and oddly isolating, but not entirely unpleasant.
Perhaps appropriately I stoked or exorcised these odd feelings of melancholy and uncertainty by going to Mozart's Requiem at the Seattle Symphony on Friday and watching Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake on Saturday. There were a few lighter moments of walking, but I think the weekend really only lightened with a ridiculous Julia and Jaana session lit with a SAD light this morning.
Enough heaviness for now. Time to discuss probate! Wait...
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