In 1986 I was a shy kid who had no concept of who I was.  I'd never had a chance to find the real me up to that point, to know what I thought or wanted, and couldn't get my act together.  I lived on hope.  Hope that things would get better, hope that I could break free, hope that I would get very lucky and get to see Papa again (though I didn't call him that back then).  I lived on the hope of the last more than anything else, that it could save me from the hell I was living in.  I'd daydream how the scene would go all the time, because I wanted it so much.  I didn't even understand back then why I counted on it so much, I just knew that I did.  April 1st,1986 started out to be a normal day, until the newspaper came.  Mom was reading it, and asked me if I remembered a teacher from the high school and she said Papa's name.  I said yes, and asked why.  She said that his name was in the paper, in the obituaries.  Time stopped, and I went in and grabbed the paper from her, and got as far as the stairs to my room, where I read it.  The obituary said that he'd died two days earlier.  I ran upstairs and fell apart.  Have you ever lost all hope?  That's how I felt in that moment.  I hadn't seen him in seven years, not since I was fifteen, but it was like I'd lost everything.  I don't know how long I cried, but it wasn't the only time.  I cried myself to sleep for days afterwards.  I couldn't help it, I was lost.  

I sat alone at his memorial service at the end of that week.  I didn't know anybody else, and I was so upset that I didn't think I could even talk to anybody without falling apart.  Luckily I didn't have a job at that point, because there was no way I could've handled working during that time.  I was going to a social worker at the time, had been for a long time, but she couldn't understand why I was so upset.  I didn't understand it myself, but this was somebody who had experience with things like this, and she was useless.  When I started getting odd ideas in my head about Annie, she told me to go with what I was thinking, instead of telling me, "You know, you've been through a very traumatic experience this year.  Take a step back and think about why you're thinking about these things."  What was happening was that in my head, Annie was all I had left, the only friend I could turn to, and I was also starting to lose it to an extent.  She got caught in the crossfire, like I said in another post.  It would've been so much worse if it had been anybody else but Annie.  She could always bring me back to reality.  After the summer, having been lucky enough to see her for a while when we were up north at the same time, all I could do was wait for the first day of school.  The problem was, I had to wait so long to see her on that day, because of the teachers meeting that took hours, my mind snapped in the process.  I can go back to that day and I can remember almost hearing it happen.  For the next week and a half I could only focus on her.  I showed up at the school much earlier and just hung around, because I had to be with her.  It was all I had, at least in my mind at the time.  Finally she said we had to talk, and we did.  She brought me back from the brink, and when I left that day I felt more normal than I had in months.  I still wasn't in great shape, but I had been brought to a place where I could at least start thinking like a normal person again. 

From then on I had to rebuild everything I knew about myself from the ground up.  There was nothing left of what I had known without the hope that Papa had given me to build the groundwork on.  I could never be the same person again.  It took a very long time to get myself together, and I didn't even realize what he had actually given me until over a decade later.  That helped with the rebuild of who I was, because it allowed me to get rid of a lot of hate I had, which had been holding me back.  I realized that destinies can be changed if you have the right tools.  I never could've done that without Papa.  It was after that when I decided that he wouldn't mind if I called him that, because the first thought I had once I realized what he really meant was that he had loved us all as his "kids".  He was proud of us when we did good, he blew up momentarily when we drove him crazy and didn't live up to our potential, and he cared about what happened to us.  I wasn't used to that in a father figure.  I only knew crazy, arbitrary, and scary growing up, not safe, strong and good.  I used that to judge men from then on, and I stopped being a scared kid. 

I've never told the story about what happened the day I found out about Papa being gone, except in a story I wrote, and then part of it was fiction.  Most of the things in this post are new to the story of what my life had been like back then.  I had to bring Annie into it, because if it hadn't been for her, I might have ended up crazy for good, or at least for a long time.  Papa gave me the foundation to build a new life on, and Annie gave me the stability and the strength to actually do it.  It's been twenty six years since Papa died, more than half my life.  I still think about him, and I still miss him, though after this long it's not painful the way it used to be.  I mostly wonder what it could've been like if he'd lived, and I miss the possibilities of what might have been.       

I'll say up front that English has always been my best subject.  I learned how to read in Kindergarten, and from then on I couldn't stop.  By sixth grade my reading level was off the chargs, and even younger, it had given me a vocabulary far beyond my actual age.  Then there was math.  I was find with it in first and second grade, when it didn't ask too much of me.  To tell the truth, now that I think back, I can't remember learning anything other than how to tell time and the differences between coins, which I learned in second grade.  I don't remember anything about actually learning addition and subtraction.  I knew it in third grade, so I learned it, but I just don't remember it all.  I seem to have blocked it out for some reason.  The first real math I remember learning was multiplication, in third grade, and that's when the problems started.  I couldn't seem to get them to stick in my head, at least not all of them.  There were some in particular that I had trouble remembering for at least the next decade.  We learned fractions that year too, and I didn't have a problem with those at all.  Not sure why.  I don't remember math at all in fourth grade, but in fifth grade we learned long division, and the hole I was already in got deeper.  I remember a relative acting as a tutor sometime around fifth grade trying to teach me something about base 10.  It's fuzzy after 35 years what he tried to teach me, or what base 10 even is.  By sixth grade I was in the lowest level in the class.  Seventh grade gave me a little good news.  For some reason I was good at simple geometry, like figuring out area and volume.  I never did figure out what was up with bisecting angles though.  I'd watch the teacher use that crazy thing that bent at different angles with the chalk in one end and making a partial circle across angles on the board, but I had no idea why he was even doing it.  By eighth grade I was looking out the window during math, and have no memory of what we learned.  The teacher was so boring that I couldn't keep any interest in what he was doing or talking about.  

Then came high school.  By then they expected us to start learning Algebra.  I took Fundamentals of Algebra in ninth grade, and barely passed.  The teacher I had the second semester told me that I was good at learning all the steps for figuring out the problems, but my basic math was bad.  That was the last math I took, except for Fundamentals of Arithmetic in college, just to see if it was a matter of a screwy school system early on.  I did better, but still had a problem when it got to the basic Algebra.  It's the main reason, if you take money out of it, that I never finished my degree.  The lowest level of math that would count as a math credit was Elementary Algebra.  There's no way I could get through that class.  It bugs me that I can't do it, but I know my limitations.  My problem is, I'm a geek.  I can only consider myself a pseudo-geek though, because of my lack of math.  My dream job would be genetic researcher.  I couldn't take the cool science classes in school because of my lack of math, so that kept me from being able to get anywhere near genetics, though I've learned things about my own, and have a basic grasp of the subject.  

Greg, with the patience of a saint, used to try to teach me math.  He wanted me to learn it, but long distance teaching/learning doesn't work, so we gave up years ago.  I got stuck in the polynomial weeds and that's as far as it went.  He would teach me if we were in the same place more often, but my frustration level gets too high to do it over the phone or in emails.  I'd like to be the brainiac I imagine myself to be.  I'd like to understand things that I don't understand now.  We watched two semesters of MIT Physics classes online years ago, and I got the basic concepts, but the equations might as well have been an alien language, so I couldn't get everything out of it that he had hoped.  We've been friends for 13 years, in a matter of months anyway, and he's taught me so many things in that time.  I understand basics of rocket science, nanotech, and all kinds of things that I totally geek out on, but there's always part of it that I can't manage because of my lack of math.  I really do want to learn it, but the thought of learning math at that level almost brings this heavy curtain down across my brain.  There's something that keeps me from it, as if it scares me to even try it because I feel stupid when I can't manage it.  I know I'm not stupid.  There are too many things I know and understand, on a high level in a lot of cases, to consider myself to be stupid.  It's just that math freaks me out, and I don't know how to get around that.   

Last month I did NaNoWriMo again. and in the last couple days I managed to pull out a win.  Two years, two wins, not bad for somebody who has writer's block for most of the time that isn't November!  I'm noticing something different this time though.  I haven't stopped writing the book this time like I did last year.  Parts of it are writing itself, and it's pretty much three weeks since November ended.  I'm also writing a short story of the back story for the novel, one because it might need it unless I incorporate it into the book somehow, and two, I'm going to see if I can sell it to Strange Horizons.  They pay actual money for stories, which would be nice.  They're particular though, so I'm not holding my breath on that one.  I just feel the need to flesh out the back story mostly. 

Also, as if I didn't have enough writing going on, I came up with the idea for another project.  This one's an experimental poetry book.  The poetry itself isn't experimental, I have a style that would be difficult to break after all these years, it's that I'm writing the poems on demand in a way.  I want to write the story of a journey, in poems, and I don't normally write poems without there being some strong emotion behind it urging me to write.  I'll still have emotion in the poems, because that's how I write, but it will be something different for me to write so many for a specific project.  All my other poems are on different subjects, but as a whole they show a journey over the past 24 years.  This new bunch will intentionally do that.  I hope it works.  These may never see the light of day, or the internet. LOL  We'll have to see how it goes. 

I'm not used to being able to do all this writing.  The novel is pretty well hashed out in my head, though there are details here and there and things that will need to be filled in during the writing of the second draft.  Parts of it are almost a sketch right now, though other parts are more detailed.  Last year's book ended in a place where I had reached not quite a dead end, but a place where I wasn't sure what needed to happen next, and I haven't gone back to it except to do some minor edits.  I really want to finish the new book first, and maybe that will allow me to go back to the first one and get it where I want it.  I know where it should end up, but getting there seems to be the problem.   

I hadn't realized that it had been six months since the last time I wrote anything here. I've been doing so much other stuff online that I lost track of this. Facebook, Twitter, getting involved in games that were getting addictive, all take up a lot of time!

Lately what's been taking up my time is planning and getting ready for my trip to NY to see Greg. I can't believe I'm finally going. I haven't seen him in three years, and even though we're on the phone twice a week for hours at a time, not seeing each other for that long sucks. Friends need face to face time occasionally.

He told me some of the stuff we're going to do while I'm there. We're going to go into the city one of the days, because NYC is the one place in the entire world that I've wanted to see in person. We're also going to dinner with his family one night, his mom's idea :), and he jumped at my idea to go to a shooting range. He said he hadn't done that in a long time, and I know he likes to do it. He owns two guns, and they've just been sitting. As much as it freaked me out when we went into the target range when we went years ago, by the time we were done I liked shooting, as long as it was with the rifle. I suck at handguns, the recoil is a bitch, and I can't control it like I can a rifle. This time we'll be using his rifles, so I'll finally get to see them. I've heard all about them over the past twelve years.

About going out to dinner with his family. I know his mom, we've talked a decent amount on the phone, and we even wrote back and forth to each other for a while. Actual letters in snail mail, because she doesn't do computers. I know she likes me, but we've never seen each other face to face. This is the one thing that makes me nervous. Letters and talking on the phone are one thing, but actually seeing a person is a totally different animal. I learned that when I met Greg the first time. Pictures just don't give you the whole story. I'm pretty sure that she's seen pictures of me, but will seeing me in person change anything? I don't know. We'll have to see. I can't wait to get there. I need this break, even though it's less than a week long. I also wonder what his father and his brother will think? I've talked to his brother on the phone for a minute (he sounds EXACTLY like Greg, it's freaky!), but not his father.

Anyway, I leave Tuesday. I don't have a smart phone or a laptop, so the only access I'll have is when I have access to Greg's laptop.

Yesterday I got an email telling me that Q had died. It wasn't quite a year after he was officially diagnosed with ALS, but he'd had serious symptoms of it for almost a year before that, so it had to have started much earlier. He essentially decided when it was time to go, because they had him on a bipap machine and an oxygen machine, which he hated. His wife told me that the last night he refused to use them. He knew what would happen, but that was him, deciding what would happen when, instead of just letting things happen. He was always stubborn, so this is no surprise. He was my first online friend, and last month marked eleven years since we'd started emailing with each other every day. He emailed me last month, out of the blue, because I thought he wasn't able to anymore. The typing needed deciphering, but I figured out how far off his fingers were from where he intended and knew what he was trying to say. The last emails I wrote him told him how happy I was that he could still communicate, and that I loved him, so I'm glad he knew when he decided it was time to go.

I should be used to this by now. I knew the risks of having friends who were so much older than I was. Yes, a couple friends were around my age, and they aren't here anymore either, but for the most part, I always had friends who were decades older than me. Once I even told myself that I wouldn't be friends with somebody because of that, but it happened anyway, and I went through the same thing when she died. I'm just tired of losing friends. In the past seventeen hours I've gone from being numb, then upset, then stable and dealing with it, back to being upset again now. I hate this freaking roller coaster. I've been on it far too many times.

A friend piggybacked off my last post to ask the question to a group she talks to on LJ. The comments they wrote totally bummed me out. They didn't upset me, but I felt sad for the newer generations. People are so freaked out and assume the worst, that the friendships I had with half a dozen teachers during my school years wouldn't be possible for them. Those teachers taught me so much, not just in class. Annie taught me strength, that you deal with what comes up and that there's a time to fall apart when things are taken care of. Papa showed me that men aren't all evil, that there are good men in the world who are good role models and don't take advantage of their positions of authority. Others just let me talk when I needed to. They were the only friends I had most years. There have to be kids like that now, kids who don't fit in with other kids. How do they cope without somebody to talk to? I was teased in school, bullied in ways that would have driven a weaker kid to do something drastic, but I had those teachers to talk to, even though I didn't mention the bullying. It didn't matter, I knew who my friends were. If kids can't have that now, I have no idea how they deal with all the garbage they have to put up with. I could've turned down every wrong path there was, drugs, drinking, sex, but I didn't do any of that. Yes, it may have seemed weird for me to keep going back to my old schools to visit teachers, but I knew they were there for me. In the 80's, after I was out of school, and things were the darkest they'd ever been, Annie was my stability. She brought me back from the brink. If I hadn't had her in my life, I'm not sure who I would be right now. I'd still be here, but in what form? I feel sorry for kids now that they can't have somebody like Annie in their lives.

Today being St. Patrick's Day, I wore green. It used to only be for Papa, but now that I know that Annie was Irish Catholic, I do it for her too. That got me thinking about her, and then the Chinese food for dinner popped into my head. That reminded me of when we'd go out to dinner to the Chinese place we liked. This was 30 years ago. People didn't think about things the way they do now. Everything these days is suspect, maybe even if the people involved are both female. Even while I was still in school, we were friends, not just teacher/student. I didn't call her by her first name until after I graduated, but it didn't matter. I'd stay after school and help her, or we'd just talk, and then there were days when she had errands to run and she'd ask if I wanted to go with. Sometimes we'd do dinner after. Nobody looked sideways at it.

I wonder if a teacher and student, even if they're both female, could do that kind of thing now without somebody questioning motives. It all started with me being her assistant during one hour during the school day, and branched out from there. Do parents keep kids so busy these days with extra curricular activities that they don't have time to hang around after school? Are the kids taught from such a young age that they shouldn't become attached to somebody they don't really know, even if it's a teacher? How do they get to know any of them if they DON'T hang around them during a less structured time? How do the kids pick out their own mentors if they don't learn who their teachers really are beyond what they see during the day? I don't have kids, so I only know what I hear about how things have changed, but I don't know things in practical terms. Are kids, even teenagers, kept from forming friendships with adults outside their families these days because their parents are afraid of what could happen? I was fifteen when I first landed in Annie's English class. Do parents trust kids that age to know how to handle themselves, or is everything controlled and structured so that a friendship like I had with Annie could never happen these days? I can't imagine not having the friendships I had with some of my teachers, and I feel sorry for kids if they can never know that kind of thing.

I'm not done yet, but I blew away the 50,000 word goal at the three week mark, so I'm official. I have the winner's certificate, I ordered the winner t-shirt, and now I have to keep writing, because there's still so much to write! I can't believe how some of it has written itself. I've never written this much dialog in my life, but I took Annie's advice that she gave me after she read the first chapter of my other potential novel about five years ago. She said "Add dialog". I always used to have a problem with it, so I didn't use it very often, but with this book it's been easy most of the time. When I do the rewrite I don't think I'll be adding dialog, I'll probably be adding description. I'm not into Anne Rice levels of description, but I do add it here and there. What I didn't do this time that I normally do too much of, is narrative. I used to just tell the story myself, and didn't let the dialog and everything else tell the story for me. Annie was the one who introduced me to creative writing back in 10th grade. We had to write a paragraph of a scene someplace, and mine was okay, but she wrote some notes in certain places in it.

I think that when I go for trying to get this book published, one of the dedications HAS to be to Annie.

When I was a kid, I saw the movie Silk Stockings.  Cyd Charisse was amazing.  I wanted to dance like that.  I asked for dance lessons, but my little sister had already been there, done that, and had stopped.  I got thrust into cello lessons.  (Yes, if I hadn't had cello lessons I never would've met Papa, I know this)  Probably for my own sanity I forgot about wanting to dance.  I still watched her movies, and still had this thing in my head that I couldn't really identify, but I went on with my life.  Then in the '90's I remembered that I had wanted to dance like Cyd Charisse.  I was almost 30 years old, I had taken a Ballet class and a Modern Jazz class in college because I needed the PE requirement covered, and I'm not athletic in the slightest, so dance was it.  I did okay in Ballet, but in Modern Jazz I had trouble following the routine after the first four or five moves.  I was in my mid 20's by then, so how I moved was pretty much set in stone.  Have I mentioned before that I'm a klutz?  I've never been graceful.  I always thought that if I had learned how to dance that wouldn't have been a problem.  Not sure it was possible though.  A friend at the time I remembered about wanting to be a dancer told me that the dream didn't have to die.  By then I was fat, my knees were screwed, and I knew she was wrong.  I forgot about it again, because what else could I do?

Tonight I was watching A Chorus Line.  I hadn't seen it in a long time, but I'm a sucker for a musical. LOL  Anyway, the memory came back of having wanted to be a dancer.  I realized, that even if I had taken lessons from the time I was six years old, I would've been done at fourteen, even if I had been talented.  Genetically my knees are totally screwed.  When I was fourteen I was living on Tylenol just to be able to walk around school all day without being in pain (it hasn't been that bad since then luckily).  For all I know, dancing would've made the problem worse.  Even if I had never gained any weight, which I didn't do until after high school anyway, I could've never been a dancer.  It just wasn't in the cards.  There was a time when that would've depressed me.  Now I know, hell, at least I can sing, and I can write.  I can still be creative.  I do what I have talent in, and I don't need to wish for something I never could have been.  I'm good with it, and being a sucker for musicals won't make me a bitter old lady someday because I can't dance.    

On Monday, the first of November, I will be embarking on utter craziness.  NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, is a chance for me to finally get that sci-fi novel out that I've been planning for fifteen years.  No editing, just writing.  Editing is for December.  This is about quantity, not quality, and that's the only way I'll ever get the story out in its entirety.  I'm such an edit freak, I reread everything I write as I write it.  NaNo doesn't work that way.  50,000 words in thirty days, 1,667 words a day.  I know that there will be days when I get a lot more than that, with the sections I've already thought about over the years, but there are sections that will totally drag me down.  I just have to remember to write, write, write!  And to remember what Annie told me after she read the first chapter of the other novel (which I may do NEXT year if this one works out): if you're writing fiction, you can take literary license even if you're dealing with something that really happened, and use dialogue.  I also have to start writing more descriptions, because I tend to be a little light in that area.  I won't go to Anne Rice levels, where it took her two or three pages to describe ONE ROOM, but I need to maybe describe how people look and some of their surroundings.  I'm always more intent on getting the plot across, but that's not necessarily going to help with word count.  I need words, lots of WORDS.  And names, I need NAMES.  I have two sets of names to come up with, and I only have a few set so far.  This thing better occasionally write itself like my poetry does!