March 2006 Archives
I'll tell you what is simply and utterly divine: Bach's "Air on the G String" Overture (Suite) No.3 in D Major. It just makes me want to put on a pair of ice-skates and do a lay-back spin. Gorgeous.
Wow...I'm totally into this "free time" thing. A walk through Central Park last night, good dinner on the UWS, yummy alcoholic "Cafe Lalo Super Shake" aftewards and home by 7:30!! Then an evening of pleasure reading. My God! I'm going to get so fucking fat now.
Even though my class doesn't end until next Tuesday, I'm unofficially finished with my MBA program. It ended at lunch today with the uneventful, unrecognized, unceremonial pressing of "submit" to send my rather large, boring strategy project and accompanying slide presentation to my professor. I would say had I been told at the beginning of this course six weeks ago that I'd be doing 75% of the project in Harrisburg while my father-in-law was busy dying, I would have said you're full of shit. But that's what happened and I was still able to do it. It has less to do with me and more to do with having enough people around me and encouraging me to take a few hours each day and just get through it. I'm exhausted and emotionally wrung out, but I'm done. AND, it's not half-assed, which was my fall-back excuse if things didn't work out.
I will say that for all the work and bitching and complaining and crying, for all the hype of sending out this last project and finishing the program, I'm very low-key and ambivalent about it right now. I'm just not one who responds well to the spotlight, preferring to just move into the next, better thing. My graduate degree is significant to me, but I'm not one for jumping up and down, no matter what I say sometimes. In lieu of celebratory calisthenics, I did run sorta crazy over at Amazon and bought a shit load of things I've been eyeing for some time:
Hell: A Novel
Urgent 2nd Class : Creating Curious Collage, Dubious Documents, and Other Art from Ephemera
Doctors and Nurses : A Novel
The Hypochondriac's Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have
Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love
Star Wars: Empire at War [CD]
I Am Not Myself These Days : A Memoir (P.S.)
The Thin Place : A Novel
Case Histories : A Novel
The Secret Supper
The Cell
Dead Beat
The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook : Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up and Cooking in the Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen in the World
And now I have nothing to do but lay around on the porch and enjoy my free time. I’m totally in love with not being in school, already.
This weekend is the annual Saint-At-Large Black Party, the venerable bacchanal held every year to usher in Spring and all things living. Of all the circuit parties, it’s the dirtiest, most fetish-aligned, down-right sex-fueled grouping of them all. Of course this is where Jeff and I met eleven years ago. The swirl of his dad’s death coupled with our over-ten years anniversarishness make strange bedfellows as neither of us feels much like celebrating anything right now, and even barring Death this year, there is the third anniversary of my Mom’s death and the 15th anniversary of my grandfather’s death the next week. Barring all that, Jeff and I gave up the Black Party the year after we met, already sealing our reputations as old, married guys by claiming that the Black Party starts too late, is too expensive, and is just over. Over for us means we just have no interest in keeping up, not that it is in anyway fashionably over. When all else fails, you have the Black Party to instill hope that Spring springs eternal.
I will leave this post referencing the source of my eternal silent stalking quest, Joe My God, who is probably napping at this very moment, getting ready for a leather-clad night with his friends and hopefully has a pencil and paper tucked neatly…somewhere…to take more notes like he did last year. His posting and those he links are well worth the read to get the real feel for the Black Party. All I got out of it was a pretty good LTR.
We buried Jeff's father, Gary, on Sunday. He died after an acute illness; a combination of emphysema and newly diagnosed lung cancer. At the end of the day, his body was simply too tired to do battle with the multiple issues and we couldn't get him back. I would tell you that I was as unprepared to lose Gary as Jeff, his brothers, his wife and his family. It was simply devastating. I knew what was happening but I lost my father that day, too.
The funny thing is, as I've been participating and watching the mourning traditions of the Jewish faith, I realize that one of the most special things about Gary was his father-figure role to a host of kids of all ages around their community. The official week of mourning constitutes a week-long "open-house" where family, friends, and acquaintances call on the mourners at their home, bringing food in, and talking of the decedent and everyone who has come through the house talks of Gary as their father. Everyone who comes to the house recounts similar tales: they grew up in Gary’s house, played with the kids, saw him at the community pool in the summers, had him as a leader in the community center for several decades and all the while, treated everyone like they were his own kids. You can read Jeff’s eulogy of his father at the family website but you only have to read the comments left by so many to understand the profound and pervasive effect Gary had on everyone.
It should not be a surprise (and in retrospect, not have surprised us) that the 800 people at Gary’s funeral all felt what made Gary so special: he treated everyone like they were number one in his life and he never bullshitted them. In the many people who spoke at the funeral, everyone recounted similar qualities: truthfulness, irreverentness, salt-of-the-earth, first to lend a hand, first to give you the shirt off his back if you asked, a man of the people, respected, trusted, a friend. If you read Jeff’s eulogy, you have to understand that Jeff stood on the alter of a very old, VERY orthodox temple and perfectly captured his father in saying things like he used to love to scratch his balls and loved a good fart. The Rabbi and Cantor were practically apoplectic and one Rabbi at the temple actually pulled Jeff aside later that night at evening prayers and tried to reprimand him for disgracing and disrespecting his father’s memory with the eulogy. The rebuttal to such a selfish, inappropriate critique (imagine accosting someone over a eulogy on the day that person’s father was buried) was fast and furious. There isn’t anyone who could deny that Jeff summed up and presented exactly who his father was, warts and all, and appreciated Jeff for keeping him alive in that eulogy. It was the very, very best kind of eulogy because unlike so many instances when someone passes and people write flowery, Hallmark-y things about the person that leaving you wondering who they were talking about, everyone knew and appreciated that the best part of Gary was his warts and to have eulogized him any other way would have been an insult to his memory.
I am one of a host of people who Gary was a father to. I’m lucky in that as a son-in-law, I pulled some extra weight and got some extra attention. He and I were solid and when the time came, I was glad that he called for me, and I was able to take his hand. I’d like to think it made his journey a little bit easier having his family around him, including me.
Jeff and I lament many, many things about the untimely passing of his father. Like everyone else, we had plans and living left for him to do. He was to retire this month and in an effort to keep his parents married during the post-retirement period, we were expecting him to be up at our house a lot. Our home for him was a place he loved and a place we loved to work on to keep him in love with it. I miss him much the way I miss my Mom, in the little everyday moments of my day when I want to just call and harass him or when I need him to bust my balls a little bit. It’s not any different than anyone else who has lost a parent, but it still strikes hard and fast in the middle of my chest, leaving a ebbing, lingering hole.
"If I can just hold it together. If I can just hold it together. If I can just hold it together for a little bit longer."
While I've sort of been away, it's not been for the reasons some might expect, such as, I'm diligently sticking my head in every book on strategy to finish up my very large, very important final project for school due in two weeks. To that end, I've just submitted the third of five pieces that make up the whole project so I'm well on my way.
The real reason I've been missing around these parts lately is that Jeff's dad was suddenly diagnosed with lung cancer or mesothelioma or both (there seems to be some lack of clarity) and has been in the hospital for the last week and a half. We've been with the family most of that time to handhold and figure out what is happening. Jeff came up with a great idea for his dad's family and friends who wanted to keep up with the situation and put a blog together: The Spitz Family Blog. Things are definitely dire but everyone is holding it together and we're hoping for the best. If anyone has pull with the Big People, thoughts and prayers are readily accepted.
I'm getting a lot of questions about what I'm going to do with my MBA once I graduate at the end of the month. Several people seem to think I'll be moving in on my boss's job which, by the way, is the WORST job in the world and I wouldn't want it. Talk about playing mother hen to a bunch of whiners. Yikes. No Thanks.
Of course there are ample opportunities to apply my new degree to make the world a better place and I think I've finally settled on what to do:
Kick ass at Star Wars: Empire at War.
Seriously. I think my degree is tailor-made to trump the shit out of this game.
