Third quarter

When my mom died my brother told me that I'd feel really terrible for six months, and then it wouldn't be so bad anymore.

All day yesterday I kept thinking, he's wrong, I still feel terrible. It feels worse now, I thought, it feels like my life is 300% harder and I'm 300% worse of a person. When I moved at the beginning of the month I realized I have boxes that I've been carrying around without opening since I moved back here from California. I finally opened one yesterday and it was full of the stupidest stuff: old xeroxes from a class I took in 2001, an empty Ikea picture frame, an unused day planner from 2000, a million really bad pictures from Las Vegas in 2003, unopened mail from when I lived in Los Angeles... There must have been a time (possibly 1999?) when I still opened my mail and didn't save broken hair accessories and Power Puff Girls snap bracelets given to me by old co-workers just because I can't deal with the decision-making process of throwing them out.

Plus, I kept thinking, how much does it suck that no one even called me on the six-month anniversary of my mom dying to tell me they were thinking about it? And that made me think of how obvious it is that people want me to be done talking about it and thinking about it. Am I going to turn into one of those people who everyone gets annoyed with because they can't stop dwelling on a tragic thing that happened years ago? But really, what else do I have to offer instead, as conversation? All I do all day is tutor ESL students, look at real estate online, and obsessively monitor my credit score. I guess once I go on vacation I'll do more writing, but who likes to talk about writing?

I rode home the L train and I couldn't stop myself from being lame and crying a little bit. It was awkward because the train was really full, and there were people that I vaguely recognized such as that one waiter from Angelica's, the one who stares a lot and has dalmatian-spotted skin.

And then this morning I woke up and realized that, although it is almost the end of the first six months of 2008, it has actually only been five months and one day since my mom died on January 27th. False alarm!

In other news, Ikea Brooklyn is just as annoying as every other Ikea, and there are mosquitoes all over New York, but at least people are still getting married in this day and age.