First of all, I'm so happy! The pictures of Cthulhu came out so hopefully before I die or go insane I will have evidence that will shock the known world. Or perhaps not if you keep up with Ohio politics.

However, even though I last "went back to school" in 1991, I still have that weird little ball of apprehension in the pit of my stomach, as I do every August. I hated school. Me and formal education have had a very uneasy relationship. (And even though I got a BA in English, I still write things like "me and formal education" instead of "formal education and I." Screw it, this is my blog, not Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Anyway.) The educational part actually wasn't that big a deal. I've always been one of those people who does well on tests, or at least I did back in 1992 when I last took one, so teachers etc. assumed I was book-smart and, oddly enough, that meant they expected less from me, not more. I've yet to figure that one out. But the problem came when I had to be surrounded by members of my peer group for eight plus hours a day.

Now, looking back as a middle-aged adult, I don't hate children. But I remember being a child, and how miserable an experience it could be. Summers, at least between the time alcohol abuse in my immediate family stopped and the time when I left my parents' home for good, meant long days outside swimming with my cousins at Brookside Pool in Ashland, or under a tree in a field somewhere reading a stack of books, and no one making any assumptions about what I was like based on the fact that I liked to read or did well on those stupid standardized tests they made you take. (On the off chance there are any young whippersnappers reading this: they didn't make you take them all year long and you weren't relegated in life to checkout clerk at Wal-Mart if you failed one, so I guess we had it good in a sense. But they were still stupid.) Yeah, I had to do things like Girl Scouts (fun once I got into it) and vacation Bible school (worse than actual school, since there wasn't even any academic value to it. In fact, the dumber you are, the better you do in vacation Bible school generally. And it only had one textbook), but mostly my summers were my own, free of academic pressure and, I'm sure, of intellectual achievement. But they were mine.

School was something else. School was all about the reputation you had from the moment you walked in the door, and seeing as I went to the same small, rural school district for all 13 years of pre-college education, my reputation was pretty well targeted by the time I got to high school. I'm proud to say that I added some new facets to it, like "scary" and "not very concerned with hygiene" by the time I made it to senior year. (In the time and place I grew up, being voted "most likely to become a serial killer," as I was, was considered a somewhat crude and hurtful joke, not a signal that I should be expelled from school. That's another explanation of a slightly kinder, gentler age for you young whippersnappers who are reading random blogs. I'm glad I'm not you, although I'm sure you do OK.) And school was about being reminded that lots of people in a small space made me want to run away as far and as fast as I could. Unfortunately for me, I had a hard time fighting this panic response, which resulted in some really wiggy and completely antisocial behavior. Looking at it from my peers' perspective, no child really wants to feel that a peer, especially a peer who authority is constantly pointing to and saying, You should be as smart, is rejecting them. So, most of my peers made a sport of shoving me away from them. Which would have been fine if we had been able to follow our instincts, me to leave and them to get me to leave, but since we were required by law to be cooped up in a school together... the consequences were pretty dire. So, I always have anxiety dreams and trouble eating this time of year.

On the other hand, the sales kick ass.

A quick post before work...

For those of you who were worried that I might be suicidal, I wanted to let you know that I actually went somewhere this weekend and had a good time. Cincinnati, to be exact... the Union Terminal and all the museums there, and the Taft Museum of Art (and Jeffersonville to get in the cheesy shopping factor, although I got some useful stuff and a Hello Kitty lunchbox for friends). If any of the photos come out, I will also have conclusive evidence that at least one of the Dark Ones lives underneath Union Terminal... more on that later (hee hee)... and apparently eats the road signs since all the signs in Cincinnati proper are about six inches high.
More on the trip to Cinci (or Cinti? Which is it?) later.

Well, I just spent all day today and all day yesterday out being sociable, so instead of blogging I should be doing laundry or dishes, or cleaning the catbox. But I wanted to get this down before I forgot it.

The past six months have not been particularly happy for me. My parents have been very ill and two friends of mine have died (one within a few days of my mom's massive stroke in March, and another very suddenly about a month ago). Periods of crisis aren't so unusual when you're in your mid-thirties and beyond, I suppose, since you know many people by that age who mean a lot to you, and they differ in age and level of health. But I was waiting for the bus at the corner of 17th Avenue and 4th Street tonight, watching the shadows swallow up campus and watching OSU students (and the ghosts of students I once knew, from OSU and from elsewhere, since OSU isn't my alma mater) cross the streets (most of them against the light -- some things never change). I thought about what I was like when I lived about four blocks away from that spot for a few months. That was back in 1992, when I first moved to Columbus. If 1992 had been like 2005, I don't know what I would have done really. I imagine that I would have lost my little mind. But here, in 2005, when I've developed (with the support of friends and some family members) the psychological tools to cope with crisis... it's not easy but I can roll with the punches.

It's funny how adulthood happens so gradually to some of us, and so suddenly to others. I think of one of my friends, who spent her teenage years constantly thinking up and carrying out (with some audacity) strategies to escape the abuse of the complete and utter tool that her mother was married to at that time. I also think of another friend whose father died of a heart attack before she was out of high school, leaving her with a mom who made (and makes) a better child than a parent. I don't have anyone as a close friend who I don't admire on some level, but both of those women are (given that we all have our neuroses) fine people who I admire very much for many reasons. I can tell you that if I had had their childhoods, I would be a far bigger mess than I am now. But I was allowed by fate or by design to grow up gradually, and for the most part, from cumulative (and relatively gentle) experience and not from any one massive crisis. If it was by fate, anything that I would have to say about it would be irrelevant, but if it was by design, I would have to ask if given the opportunity: so why is that, anyway?

I promise not to bitch and moan any more about how hard life has been for the last six months. (Although I reserve the right to complain about things like my dad not saying anything to me or my sister about being admitted to the hospital for pneumonia, or my mom refusing to take all of her meds.) I would like to add though that Sissy and Pilar were great women who I and lots of other people will miss very, very much. I don't believe in the kind of afterlife where you get a halo and a set of wings (although wings would kick ass, and although both of those women were Christians. Maybe they did get wings, and maybe they are kick ass. But I have my doubts). I also suspect that very little if anything survives of our personalities in any universal, cosmic sense. However, there is more than one form of immortality, and to be loved by many people who will tell others about how cool and smart and brave (and adult) you were when faced with life's crap is a good immortality. A pretty famous atheist once said that we are all made of starstuff. I would only add that there is mental starstuff as well as physical starstuff. That atheist (who died, oh, a good ten years ago now) lives on in a few of the books on my bookshelf. But he also lives on in my thoughts ten years after his death, as do my departed friends, as do all the people who were once in our physical spaces but who only live now in our heads, as tonight the ghosts of students I once knew did, as the ghost of the person I once was does.