return to the business

I am home from the last thanksgiving with my family. My dad's family is really held together by my grandmother. She has a huge tumor in her innards. We've known for a while that she was ill, but it's the first time that I've seen her that she looks frail and slow and green. I don't know that I'll see her again since I'm not going home for Christmas. That is a very anxious feeling: I don't have anything particular to say to my grandmother, but it is very troubling and distracting that I will likely not have the opportunity to do so again. I have never enjoyed hanging out with my dad's family, but it's been part of my life for thirty years. And really, I think I will probably never do more than exchange emails with some of my cousins for the rest of my life--and given my track record, it will probably be less even than that. The trip up was hard, mostly because I thought I wouldn't feel much at all at this end of an era--if anything that I'd be relieved to be unburdened of this obligation--and instead I feel like it is an awkward sort of loss.

Now that I'm back, the november relaxation is fully over. It is now time to return to the business: the business of busting a move through a whole set of postdocs that I didn't really look at this whole month while I was out and about, enjoying the city. I have to finish the first by friday. However, there is no time in the week: the nights will be long and late, which will make the mornings shorter or more unbearable.

Meanwhile, rather than consider a new postdoc project and how to write a "letter of application," I am currently watching another unbearable Michael Henecke film, Code Unknown. It's really beautiful, even though it has a kind of pulp fiction/crashy set up: strangers whose lives intersect through a series of vignettes. Of course, since it's Henecke, it absolutely avoids the failure of those movies by making truly no attempt to turn the fragments into an overarching narrative with a meaning that is greater than the accumulation of fragments. Netflixed.