"For indeed I myself have seen, with my own eyes, the Sibyl hanging in a bottle at Cumae, and when those boys would say to her: 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'"
-Petronius, Satyricon
The Sibyl at Cumae was loved by the god Apollo, and he told her he would grant her a wish in exchange for her virginity. She lifted up a handful of sand and asked to live as many years as there were grains. When she later refused his advances, Apollo still granted her wish for near-eternal life, but without eternal youth, for which she had not asked. She lived so long that she was eventually no more than a piece of shrivelled flesh in a bottle, left to hang in the Cumaean caves.
The last time I saw my great grandmother was in November. She was hunched over, her lower lip hanging loosely from her face, her unseeing eyes hidden behind a pair of oversized glasses. Before we had even sat down she offered us an array of cookies and chocolates and would not rest until we had each partaken of them. Despite the change in her physical appearance - compared to now, she had been lively and spry the last time I had seen her, at her one hundredth birthday party two years before - her personality was unchanged, and I was relieved to see that.
"How does it feel to be one hundred and two?" my sister asked her when we had finished our cookies. She was quiet for a moment; at first I thought she had not heard the question, but unlike her eyesight, which had failed, her hearing was still sharp. "It is enough," she said after a minute, and the words were heartbreaking. She was ready to die. When we left that day, I knew I would not see her again.
Last Wednesday, my great grandmother (called "Oma," the German word for "grandma," by her great grandchildren), died the way she wanted to; peacefully in her sleep. By the time of her death she had been witness to over a century of both global and personal history. In 1936, with her husband incarcerated in a Nazi prison, she left Germany with two children under the age of 5 and no knowledge of the English language to seek asylum in New York (my great grandfather, and most of her immediate family, were luckily later able to join her there). She saw the births of two daughters, five grandchildren, and ten great grandchildren and the deaths of her parents, husband (whom she outlived by forty years), siblings, and a grandchild (whom she outlived by almost thirteen). She lived through two world wars, the Holocaust, the Korean, Vietnam, and both Iraq wars, 9/11 and the election of the first black president.
Her funeral, an affair as simple and unpretentious as the life she lived (she had planned all the details and paid all the expenses years beforehand), was today, and I do not think I have yet begun to miss her as I will in the years to come. She has been a fixture in my life for the entirety of it and the matriarch of our family for even longer. She embodied selflessness, living her life for her family. Oma always knew the whereabouts and accomplishments of her grandchildren and great grandchildren, and took no small pleasure in telling her friends about them. It was her capacity for love, true and unconditional love, that distinguished her from so many other people in this world.
I do not know what happens after death. I suspect it might be nothing, and am okay with that. Whatever it is, I know that Oma, long-loving and ever-uncomplaining, is at peace.
For my birthday last month my roommates, Rachel and Kenny, took me to The Comedy Studio in Cambridge. Hidden on the third floor of a Chinese restaurant,
The Comedy Studio doesn't do any traditional advertising, preferring the word-of-mouth method; hence, I had never heard of it. I enjoyed the show and the experience so thoroughly that I actually caught myself thinking, during it, that I had to somehow be a part of it.
My first foray into the Boston comedy scene was less than successful, involving more plumbing and heavy lifting than actually comedy, but I was so inspired by the show at The Comedy Studio that I wanted to give it another try. I decided right then and there to go up to the owner afterwards and ask for a job. When I told Kenny my plan, he suggested I come back on a Wednesday, the night when they audition new talent (and when the audiences are naturally more sparse than the bustling Saturday-night crowd) and try my luck then.
Every Wednesday for about a month, I found an excuse not to go: I was too tired from work, it would take too long to get there, etc. Finally, a week and a half ago, I bit the bullet and decided if I didn't do it that Wednesday, I wouldn't do it at all. Fueling me was the fact that I had nothing to lose. So, armed with a resume and a peanut butter sandwich to eat on the train between work and Cambridge, I set out.
The show itself was alright. Some of the comedians were better than others. The audience, unfortunately, was terrible. I really felt for the performers. With the post-show music still blaring and audience members hanging around finishing their drinks, I realized I would have to wait until everyone cleared out till I could speak with the owner, and that's when I almost chickened out. But I knew I would regret not waiting.
When everyone had finally left and the music was turned off, I went up to the owner. After what I determined to be an appropriate amount of small talk regarding how the show had gone that evening, I went for it.
"I like this place," I told the owner. "This is my second time here, and I like the way you do things." I was quick to add, "And I'm not just saying that to flatter you; I don't think you need the flattery."
"Of course," he agreed.
"And I want to work for you," I blurted out. There was a beat, and I couldn't tell from his expression what he was thinking.
"In what capacity?" he asked slowly. "Do you do stand-up?"
"No," I quickly assured him. "I think when I grow up [Note: I actually said "when I grow up"] I want to be a producer, and I want to somehow work in comedy. I think I want to do what you do."
He looked at me. "Well," he said, "we can start you off working the door, then we can see where things go from there. When can you start?"
On the T ride to Cambridge, I had anticipated every possible scenario, worked out how I would cope with any sort of rejection he could possibly give me. But it hadn't crossed my mind that he would actually give me a job on the spot, and when it happened, it seemed too easy. When I got home and told Kenny, he suggested that maybe I had made an impression on the owner by putting myself out there, which seems likely. But still too easy. I had risked all (or nothing, depending on how you look at it) - and actually won.
Last Friday I paid a long-awaited visit to Dana-Farber to consult with them about genetic testing. My aunt, who six or seven years ago tested positive for the genetic mutation associated with breast cancer, has been encouraging me to get the test done for a few years now. So, though I am ashamed to say it, I made the appointment less out of my own desire to find out whether I have this mutation and more to make her drop the subject.
I have never wanted to get this testing done. My aunt first brought it up in 2004 when I was 18 - a ridiculously young age to do such a test - and I sort of resented her doing so. I was just about to begin college and the last thing I wanted to worry about was whether my body was a ticking time bomb. Now that I'm 23 I still don't want the testing done, but I figured there's no harm in arming oneself with a little knowledge, so I took the day off work on Friday and got on a bus for Dana-Farber.
I arrived late because it seems to be a rule with the MBTA that if you need to be somewhere at a specific time, they need to be at least 10 minutes behind schedule. The first thing they did (after I filled out the requisite paperwork) was slap a hospital bracelet on me, explaining that while in the hospital, all patients had to wear bracelets. In addition to my name and date of birth, I noticed that the bracelet had a barcode on it. I wondered whether, if they didn't want to talk to me or take the time to read the bracelet, they would just scan the barcode and get the information that way. They didn't.
I was scheduled to meet with two people that day; a genetic counselor and a doctor. First was the genetic counselor, and when she appeared in the waiting room to get me, I thought she must have been there simply to transfer me to someone else because she seemed unreasonably young for someone in this line of work. She couldn't have been more than five or six years older than me but she was, indeed, the genetic counselor. The first thing she did was make a family tree. She asked me about every member of my family on both sides, about their ages and whether they had ever been sick. Then, in simplified but not condescending terms, she explained the situation to me. She said that two genes discovered in the 1990s, called BRCA1 and BRCA2, are responsible for preventing breast cells from becoming cancerous. If one (or both) of those genes are mutated, the risk of developing breast cancer goes up. Because of my family's history of breast cancer, there's a 50% chance that I inherited the mutation of one of these genes.
She also explained what such a diagnosis would mean. Having the mutation doesn't mean you'll get cancer, only that they'll have to monitor you more closely for it. So once every six months or a year you have to get a mammogram and MRI to rule out the existence of a tumor. If you're tested for the mutation and don't have it, you don't have to go through the screening. But if you're at high risk (like me) and choose not to find out whether you have the mutation, you have to have the screening done anyway for the sake of caution. So the question, for me, was whether I wanted to know for sure if I have the mutation or not. When I was finished talking to her, I was confident that I wasn't ready to know, and she told me that was OK. I could have the screenings done and if down the road I decided I wanted to be tested, I could.
I felt pretty good after talking with the genetic counselor. I had felt a little abnormal for not wanting to get it over with and find out whether I carry the mutation, but she assured me that there was nothing wrong with that. It was reassuring that she seemed to understand and support the decision I was making. So I went on to the meeting with the doctor feeling pretty positive about things. The doctor was a Jewish woman in her late forties or early fifties and she entered the room followed by a medical student with acne and a bored look on his face. I was not thrilled about having him there, but I had just signed the form giving my consent for his presence, so I didn't want to throw him out just yet.
Things started off well. She asked me where I had gone to school, what I majored in. What I'm doing right now, my future career goals. The usual. But apparently Doctor and Genetic Counselor don't talk to each other much, because as soon as she was finished with the pleasantries, Doctor dove right into the same information I had just been given by Genetic Counselor - only she gave it to me like I was eight years old.
"Did you take biology in college?" she asked.
"No. You'll have to start from the beginning with me," I joked. She didn't laugh.
"Basically, you can think of genes as a book of instructions. They tell our bodies what color our hair and eyes should be, how tall we'll be, things like that. Each gene is like a page in the book, but if one page is ragged and torn, that's what we call a mutation."
OK, I thought, I may not have taken college-level biology, but I did somehow make it through high school, so you don't have to talk to me like I'm a child. I was beginning not to like Doctor, and I didn't really fancy sitting through the whole "this is what genes are" spiel dumbed down with the book metaphor (because I was an English major, and saying genes are like books makes them into something familiar!)
When she was finished explaining genes, Doctor then basically told me that I would be a fool not to get the testing done and find out, once-and-for-all, whether one of the pages in my instruction book was all torn up. As calmly as I could, I told her that I understood the ramifications of not having the test done, but that I had firmly decided that at this point in my life, I had decided to do just that. She told me I could always change my mind when I got tired of going through the screening every six months.
Doctor did somewhat redeem herself, though. During the physical examination (before which I had given Disgruntled Medical Student his dismissal), she engaged me in conversation about the closing of the Rose Art Museum. Afterwards, whilst encouraging me to take part in a study, she called me Miss A---, and being the lover of things 19th-century-related that I am, I was tickled by her use of the honorific. I wasn't thoroughly pleased with her, but if I were to give her a grade, it would be a B- or a B. So she passed.
While there is a 50% chance that I carry the genetic mutation that has caused so much carnage in my family, for now I am at peace with those odds, not-so-great as they are. It's really very simple: I either have the mutation or I don't, and if I do have it, I've had it since birth. There is nothing that could have been done to prevent it, if indeed it exists. Someday I may want to find out for sure. But not right now.
I recently found this t-shirt design, which immediately caught my fancy:
I would have worn it proudly circa 2006. However, since I am no longer a college student, and can thus no longer really be "defined" by my course of study, the point would be moot.
I have always had a poor relationship with numbers. Though I was a good student in general, I could never bring myself to pay attention during math lessons in elementary school. I paid dearly for it in middle and high school, when my lack of simple mathematical knowledge really hurt me. I always had the suspicion that despite what my teachers said, I wouldn't really have to use the math they taught me in day-to-day life. And I was right. Even so, numbers are still there. I got to thinking about the numbers in my life, and this is what I came up with.*
6 The number of Dunkin' Donuts I pass on my way to work. One of the first things I noticed when I came to Boston for college was that people here love Dunkin' Donuts. No, love isn't the right word. They worship Dunkin' Donuts. They kneel at its alters, which are, luckily, conveniently located mere blocks away from one another. There is literally nowhere you can go here without running into those familiar pink and orange stripes. Not that I'm complaining; their vanilla chai lattes are pretty good (I don't drink coffee). But where I grew up, I knew of only one Dunkin' Donuts. Yet somehow, we were able to manage. And vote Democrat in the recent presidential election. Maybe you heard about it.
9 The (approximate) number of scheduled hours of TV I watch per week. I've mentioned before that I watch a lot of TV. And 9 is just the number of scheduled hours I watch: I have shows I watch every night of the week except Friday and Saturday. I didn't plan it; it just worked out that way.
2 The number of dates I've been on in the past 6 months. Both nice guys; neither worked out. I'm over it.
2 The number of free drinks I've gotten in the past 6 months (see above).
4 The number of days I've spent at home (i.e., Cleveland) in the past 6 months. In some ways that's not enough, in others it is. Of course I enjoy visiting with my father and my dog (the only ones who live there now, as my siblings are both in college). But my dad is in the process of selling our house, an action which is somewhat painful to me, it being the only house my family has ever lived in. When my parents bought it in the mid '80s, it was carpeted in this admittedly hideous brown shag carpeting, which remained there until a few months ago (it wasn't really a selling point). When I visited in July, some very nice looking wood floors (which had been under the carpet the whole time!) greeted me. And while I have nothing against wood floors, it just wasn't the same. Hence my aversion. Like so many important things in my life that have been taken away from me or left me, it is easier to pretend it never existed than to face the pain of its loss.
3 The number of times I have read my favorite novel (Vanity Fair). I mention it because I am about a third of the way through reading number 4 right now. Some people are spoken to by music, or art, or politics, or any number of things that can capture the human imagination. This book is what speaks to me. If I could make a living of trying to understand it, I would. I could talk about it endlessly if I could find someone who would listen. Every time I read it, the story, the characters, the moral are the same as the time before. And yet it never tires me, and there is always something more to learn from it or about it. If only more things in life were like that.
*That was a long and overly-elaborate segue into what I really wanted to write about. I hope you enjoyed it.
There is nothing else to say.
As if on cue, my father had a new question for me when I spoke to him a few days ago:
"How's your job search coming?"
I should explain that I get along really well with my father, and that I value and respect his opinion. But he apparently has this notion that now that I am "bringing in some money," I should be looking for a full-time job, the goal of which I assume would be to bring in more money. And the matter-of-fact way in which he posed the question, as if to get a job so I could be working while looking for a better job should have been part of my plan from the beginning, quite frankly annoyed me.
There was a commercial on a while back (I can't remember what for) which said something to the effect of "We know you don't just work for money." It showed pictures of kids running into their father's arms and other hokey visuals to explain why people go to work each day. At the time, I thought it made no sense. Of course people work for money. Money is why people work. But the more time I spend at my job (I've been there about a month and a half now) the more I am beginning to understand the meaning of the commercial better: while I do work for money, I wouldn't do just anything to get it. If I sat in an office eight hours a day staring at a computer screen, I might make more money. But I would absolutely hate going to work every morning. If you're lucky, you go to work because you enjoy what you do, not just to fill in the time between bill payments.
Right now I am enjoying what I'm doing. My current job is not part of my career goal (which veers, in fact, in a totally different direction from where I am now), but I like it for what it is and I'm happy there. And if I can spend some time there while planning for my next move - the one into an actual career - why shouldn't I? While it grieves me to be at odds with my father, it would grieve me even more to be at odds with myself.
I was on the phone with my dad the other day. I haven't seen him for awhile, not since I went home in July for a weekend visit. I'm used to going months at a time without seeing him (or anyone in my immediate family, for that matter) because of the distance. He's never been to my apartment. He hasn't seen where I work. In short, he doesn't really know much at all about this new post-college life I'm starting to make for myself. Which is I guess what prompted the question he asked me:
"What do you do?"
I was a little taken aback, and I didn't know quite how to answer. I think what he meant was what do I do in my free time, but it got me to thinking: without classes, homework and extracurriculars - the essentials of my life for 17 years - with what activities do I fill my days?
The answer:
I wake up. I take a shower. I check my e-mail, Facebook and MSNBC.com. I eat brunch. I commute an hour to work. [Side note: I find it funny that I live in the city and work in the suburbs. For some reason that amuses me.] I work a job I like (thankfully) with people I like (also thankfully). I take the bus and T home. I make and eat dinner. I divide the rest of the night between putzing around on the computer and watching TV. (A lot of TV - probably more than any human being should ever be exposed to. In fact, I'm convinced that my roommate and I are the ones keeping the producers of those awful VH1 reality shows in a job. Whatever we can do to help the economy).On Saturdays I grocery shop and on Sundays I do laundry or return library books, whichever needs doing. I spend weekend nights with friends or family, or sometimes just at home.
And that's it. It's a repetitive lifestyle, and much more quiet than what I am accustomed to, especially after the past four years, when there were weeks at a time where I would barely have a moment to breathe. Despite the monotony, though, I find that I like it. I thrive on a schedule, and if doing the same things at the same times day after day isn't the definition of a schedule, I don't know what is. For now, it suits me. And besides, who would want a life where checking ICanHasCheezburger.com wasn't part of the daily routine? Not I.
I look at this every day.
