Friendship: The Unspoken Pathogen
Category: Duct Tape and Prayers
living with cancer
Why did the duck cross the road?
…because the Lakewood, Wa police officer stopped traffic to let her (and her ducklings):
Carrell was off duty Monday and driving his patrol car back to the station. About 9 a.m., he noticed a car stopped on the westbound highway’s left lane near Interstate 5. Carrell saw a mama duck and about 10 ducklings near the median. The other car drove off, and Carrell positioned his vehicle to shield the ducks. Eventually, the family began its trek across three lanes of traffic.
One duckling veered from the group, so Carrell set off his air horn, which sounds a lot like a quack. It made all the ducks sit and got the little one back in line, he said. Carrell then got out of his car to escort them across the exit lane. With mama duck quacking at him, the group found its way safely into a ravine.
When it was done, Carrell dropped off his patrol car off and drove to Oregon with his wife and 7-month-old daughter to visit relatives. He didn’t know he would become a Web sensation. A state Department of Transportation camera captured his good deed, and the video is now on the Internet.
-The News Tribune
People have been calling the Lakewood police to express gratitude to Officer Dustin Carrell; if you’d like to add your voice to the chorus, you can contact the department here:
Lakewood Police Department
5504 112th St SW
Lakewood, WA 98499
(253) 830-5000
That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
— The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1
by William Shakespeare [1564-1616]
by way of grrlscientist
passages
Last night, and for the first time, I talked about and cried about my mother to another person – well, to a friend. (I’m pretty sure the one off counselor I tried to see when I realized things weren’t going well doesn’t count.) And as expected, I’m feeling rather weirdly raw and vulnerable this morning (my morning after’s are so much less interesting than other people, aren’t they?), but… I don’t know if better is the right word, but maybe looser? A little less tight, a little more relaxed. A little more like there might be a safety net if I fall.
Sort of related, I’ve realized lately how much I miss feeling music – I’ve been listening to very bass/drum heavy goth and industrial music in the car of late, making sure to rest my leg on the speaker, or have a hand on the roof (which is great for transmitting acoustics). It just feels better to feel the music, to experience it in body total. I think it’s something primally wired within us, because it occurred to me last night that it’s very similar to feeling a voice talk as you rest on someone’s chest.
ramping intensity, difficulty
I’ve been doing okay lately. Better. I’ve had help, help that I don’t think is really completely aware of being help, which is in and of itself sweet and gentle and I think what has been needed. Just being pulled out, by force, to interact with people and the world, rather than hide in my bedroom. Hiding now, it elicits a phone call. (And in random trivia, that means there are now two people who’re aware enough of me and my habits that if I break them, they call.)
But as I was grocery shopping today, I realized that the next few weeks are going to be hard. Not only it’s the end of the semester so I have papers to write, but because the Hallmark machine is ramping up to Mother’s Day. I guess I get to see just how onion-paper thin my skin is, and how settled and stable I am. My birthday is a few days after that, and I have plans for a small vacation right then, so… hopefully that will help.
Doesn’t change the fact that I expect the next couple of weeks to be rough. And once we’re out of Mother’s Day, we’re right into her birthday.
Last night I was driving to Kurver to get some soft serve – singing along to the David Cook CD I had playing at loud levels, windows down, nice evening breeze. And suddenly from nowhere there were fireworks all over the sky, and I ended up skipping Kurver to drive towards and around the fireworks, just enjoying and having that awe that always washes over me. The road I ended up on reminded me of this place outside of Great America, in San Jose, where we’d go every year on the Fourth of July. Dad’d park the Ford and we’d climb on top of the camper and lay out on the roof and watch the fireworks explode directly overhead, feel the vibrations reverberate through our bodies and the car – my first true memory of understanding how we can be connected by more forces than just touch – the music (Peter, Paul & Mary, Paul Revere and the Raiders), the traffic and not paying so much attention to that because we were sleepy by then, lulled safe and secure in the bed of the truck as Mom and Dad talked.
These things wash over and through me every time I see fireworks, memories that connect me to my family, past, and present.
I think last night was the first time I watched fireworks since Mom died. And in the middle of the awe, I found myself singing along to the music, and remembering, and bursting into tears.
And now I’m telling tales about weeble spaceships and find myself laughing and crying at the same time. I just have to remind myself that this? Is better than where I was before.
waffles
Life is hard, and a lot of it is not about the mistakes you make, but the lessons you learn after – and how you react. Do you integrate and learn and modify, or do you stay in a rut? It’s tempting to stay in ruts – they’re worn out and comfortable and familiar. But you feel better if you learn and modify and grow. No one ever likes to be stagnant.
I’ve never been shy about what drives my pull, sometimes, to drop everything and turn course, to go into forensics, do something Extremely Stupid like join the FBI. It’s not really the work, it’s the depictions of camaraderie. It’s why the military always appealed, even though oh my god, can you imagine me in the military, or anyone trying to give me orders? Yeah – it just doesn’t end well in your mind, does it? But camaraderie. The group of people that gets together once a week around a table to have dinner. That calls each other up randomly to invite out, that talks late into the night about fears and dreams and hopes. Who shoulder the weight of each others burdens, because sharing makes the load lighter.
I have a habit of getting into load bearing situations, though, where I take and take, but rarely give. I loved so much of CHID because it was the first place I had found since probably my early (early) teens where everyone gave and took with equal free abandon, and I was so happy there. Paired with the few close friends I had made in the goth community, and I was just genuinely happy – I was beyond happy, really. I was eudaimonic, I was flourishing.
No one would accuse me of flourishing much these past two years. I might have started to, but then Mom got sick, and it slowly dawned on me that I was repeating my mistake/inclination to give without receipt in a situation I originally thought so vital to flourishing. I’ve really floundered about, and badly. (Where are the greek speaking geeks when I need them – what’s the opposite of eudaimonic?)
And now I’m in a situation where there’s a small group of active and social and happy people who seem to like me, and I so very much like them. We all seem to want the same thing – the people to hang out with casually, the closeness, that your family is who you make feeling of dinner and movies and casual familiarity; friendship and belonging. It’s been fun, it’s been exhilarating. And overwhelming and scary and hard to trust, hard to believe I might have found something that it always seems like other people but never me get to have. So I’m afraid I’m going to self destruct, shoot myself in the foot, test too had and continuously, push away.
I don’t know how to work through the caution without singularly giving in to abandon. Or, as a friend so eloquently stole from Nietzsche, I don’t know how to give a semblance of organization to the chaos of my passions – but I really ought to go about figuring it out. Before I self destruct. Again. And then have the added hell of knowing I was so close to reaching out and touching what I so very much want, but through my own actions was unable to receive.