chapter one: le petit mori

chapter one: le petit mori
mark and i have been very, very bad at unpacking this place. rather, i should really say that i have been very, very bad at unpacking, because nearly all of the roughly opened overflowing boxes in the sweltering attic are, in fact, mine.

today i'm on assignment: i'm supposed to finish up the second drafts of one chapter and one whole manual. i'm a bit peeved at my team, because i received feedback from only three people out of twelve. and yet, who's going to throw a fit when a particular point isn't addressed perfectly? those other nine.

whichever way, this afternoon i happened to be up in said sweltering attic looking for a printer cable. yep, i, the glorious goddess of packratness, managed somehow in the jump from new york to delaware to lose the one-and-only cable for my one-and-only printer. good job. i lost count of how many dead things i found tanning themselves on top of box flaps, i hit my head more than i'd like to admit, and i think i let cancer seep successfully in through the soles of my feet. and i didn't find the printer cable.

but i did find my old address book, three ziploc bags of pencils and markers and pens, and a blue notebook.

i used to have a thing for blue notebooks. in high school, i had a thick five-subject bright blue notebook that contained all of my deepest thoughts, lurid fantasies, wannabe song lyrics, and hate lists. all the boys in our group wanted into that notebook, and no one ever got it. now it's in one of the boxes in the attic - the ripped front covered with duct tape and permanent marker designs.

this blue notebook is a lot thinner, a small 70-sheeter. it was bright blue at some point, but now it is all scratched up - blue, black, and white. on the inside cover, written in blue marker that matches exactly to the color that the cover was:
CALCULUS
MW 10-11:40 ~ NAC 6/114
Prof Kaminetzky
ah, yes, that old failed calculus course. that one class might have been what got me into this whole mess in the first place, come to realise. the rest of the notebook holds clues to the rest of the trouble: a class schedule, a written copy of a course syllabus, scribbled notes to friends, assignments, doodles, notes from at least three different courses... this is it. the beginning of the end.

on the fourth page, written carefully at the top in the painstaking script dad grilled into me:

Obituary assignment:
Obituaries let the public know, remember
- any age you want to be
- who you were
- what you did
- where you lived/ were born
- write about self in past tense
- use creative process (column, article, front-page, etc.)

oh, oh, the hopeful, glad, happy obituary assignment!

some of my classmates lamented that this, this horrible professor, this horrible assignment. how dare she make us think about death - about our own death! well, peers, you're in a 300-level death in renaissance course, but all practicality aside, it's not that macabre. this is our chance, our dream, our hope! we can make ourselves whatever we want to be! we can take that self outside of the darkness of our brain, the emptiness of thought; take it into the brightness of day, the lines of page! we can invent ourselves again with all the promise we squandered!

three pages later, in furious half-script, lies the draft of my obituary: long-hand math in the margins to figure out "my" age; scribbles through proposed marital surnames; arrows here and there to indicate a frenetic order; bullet points for "married" "children" "grandchildren" along with names.

ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of a hopeful, glad, happy obituary. "obituary, due 29 august 2007," we hardly knew you. you were scribbled on a half-torn-out page of a blue notebook, familiar only to your author. a heavy blue star adorns part of you, laden with a note to check the NYT obits. you were used and abused to reflect the foolishly ideal life of your author, but you knew better. you knew that you were more intelligent, more telling, than the crisp white printed paper your author gave to her professor. you were more deserving of the prominent check-plus in purple ink on the page, knowing what you know now. your author looks at you now with laughing eyes, how could she have been so silly then. "then," not even a year hence. obituary, thank you for your faithful, proving, true service. thank you for proving her wrong. amen.