Eek! So I let my domain expire because I registered it many years ago, which is like one million years in Internet years, and get no notifications about such things like paying to keep it. I got it through Yahoo! and it’s associated with a lil’ email address I like to call rebecca_armendariz@yahoo.com. This is what that inbox looks like:
LOL FOREVER.
So I am trying to win my domain back from the place Yahoo! sends the domains back to when they expire, Melbourne IT, which is in Australia so I am losing. For now, keep up with whoabecca.wordpress.com. Soon, I will make a new domain that is maybe modeled after my actual name and not the AIM screen name I made in 9th grade.
Sometimes I get really down on writing my book. Writing the first 45 – 50 pages has been harder than I anticipated because I was often made the bad guy during the beginning stages of Clark’s cancer fight. It’s a period that generally sucks to recall, and this particular recollection is especially trying because I’m remembering things from my current perspective and mood, which have shifted over the years.
After my article on Facebook’s Timeline was published, some who had endured similar struggles contacted me. I exchanged a few emails woman whose partner also died of melanoma, and we talked about crying in public and developing and becoming comfortable with our own particular brands of crazy. She even put a jab in there negating other types of cancer, which made me laugh so hard and feel so understood. (Lymphoma? Please.)
I received another email, though, from a person whose boyfriend is currently dying of complications from cystic fibrosis. I had never before spoken to someone in the process of losing a partner. We’ve written to each other a few times; she said she took comfort knowing she can tell me anything that’s going on and that I have some idea of what she’s talking about. All of what she says rings true, so I affirm her experience and check in every few weeks. I think about her multiple times per day.
Over Memorial Day weekend, I went to a barbecue at Jeff’s friend’s house. His usual crew was in attendance. One of his buddies had a date I hadn’t really met before, and we traded greetings. A few days later, she sent me an email explaining how she started following my blog after a friend of hers sent a link to my piece in GOOD (it pains me to link to it now because the magazine laid off nearly the entire editorial staff on Friday. Ann-as-editor was a vital part of making this piece great.). She wrote a comment on the article and said she wanted to give me a hug and how, if she was still in D.C., she’d buy me a beer.
She writes: Then, the strangest thing happened. I got divorced and I moved back to Maryland. I recently started dating again and I went to a barbecue on Sunday in Petworth and I swear that you were there (Dave’s house?).
For the same reasons why these people felt compelled to reach out to me, this book is important. Thanks for the reminders.
I am inspired to write this post by this nod to the song “Ruin My Day” from Jon Brion’s 2001 album, Meaningless.
Meaningless reminds me of my four-month stay in Los Angeles in the summer of 2005. At first I was so lonely; I called my mother and then-boyfriend in the middle of fits of gulping sobs, knowing they could do nothing about it, wanting them to take responsibility for the consequences of a decision I made myself. It was terrible of me, like burying them in the sand and walking away from the mound.
I was 21 and about to enter my senior year of college. I was living off a settlement from a car accident in a subleased apartment in Westwood. I had a car. I went to an internship three days per week and took a class some nights. It took me a few weeks to see how good I had it. (And right now, I’m pretty disgusted to think it took me that long.)
Eventually, though, I learned to relish this alone time. I read on the outdoor patios of coffee shops with honey-flavored coffee drinks. I strolled through art museums, skipping rooms that didn’t interest me. I stayed home and chain-smoked cigarettes on the apartment’s tiny patch of deck. I listened to piles of previously undiscovered records in hours of traffic. Being by myself is the best, I realized. I can do whatever I want.
Halfway through the summer, my boyfriend came to visit me for an entire week. That Friday, we got in line at Largo at 4 p.m. and sat on the sidewalk, the sun-heated concrete searing the backs of our thighs. (The one person in line before us was obvs insufferable.) During this time, Jon Brion was playing there weekly. The table seats sold out weeks in advance, but there were 12 or so bar stools available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Chris and I were determined to get two of them, and we did. And sure, we saw him together, but the experience of watching the show is my own. I cried when he played tracks from Eternal Sunshine (duh).
This album, which I listen to straight through like a movie, reminds me of that entire summer, when I came to rely on my own reserves.
(P.S. A brag: While in Los Angeles, I got to go to the office of NANCY MEYERS because she’s an AU grad).
Jessica and I recently discussed how at this point in our lives we’re mostly into listening to pleasant background music we can pretty much ignore (Washed Out, Small Black), but sometimes when I’m trying to ignore other things (people’s voices, responsibilities), I funnel songs with harmonies and the occasional brass section through my headphones.
To admit that I’ll only listen to Rufus Wainwright’s new record, Out of the Game, all the way through once, ever, is a big deal for me, and hurts my heart, because if you haven’t yet noticed, Rufus has his own category on this blog (because this blog is one million years old), and I was once an obsessed superfan who stalked him by the stage door of a London gig in 2004. WEARING A TRENCHCOAT, no less!
Out of the Game evidences his trade of meth-fueled promiscuity for a very tall German husband and baby daughter; of zebra print for pinstripes; and of acoustic strumming and lush orchestra backing for “smooth” and “groovy” elevator guitars (quoting otherreviews here) and aged doo-wop lady vocal blends.
It’s cool, though. He’s grown older and settled down, and I admire his choice to swap destructive for responsible behavior.
I’m kind of air-handjobbing all over the inclusion of Mark Ronson as producer, though. If Rufus has resigned himself to the future described in the song “Montauk” (One day you will come to Montauk and see your dad wearing a kimono / And see your other dad pruning roses / Hope you won’t turn around and go), why get the guy who clothes-pinned the lead singer of Phantom Planet’s sagging vocals to classic Radiohead to spray Sgt. Pepper all over everything? Couldn’t Rufus decorate things himself? (Disclaimer: I was once obsessed with Phantom Planet.)
Rufus’ evolved life rules, but the music about his advanced state of being kinda bores me (one exception: this song). And while I don’t really care about “Montauk,” I’d certainly give birth to a first-born child just to trade it for an invite to his bathrobe garden party. So at least something was achieved here.
I am working on my book and digging through old Clark memories so much that it seems pointless and unhelpful to me to continue to write solely about him here. Though the book proposal process is moving way more slowly than I initially thought (maybe because it’s hard? who knew!), I’m chugging along. Before I write a new “part,” I have to go through the Google Calendar and my Gmail to create a sort of timeline of events, and creating that sequence of events drains me. But I am writing as fast as I can. The last part I wrote, in fact, was called “the best” so far by one Miss Jessica Guilfoyle.
I attempt to be amusing on my Tumblr, but that’s short form, people, and I have lots of things to say. So I am going to blog about lots of things here from now on, I have decided.
One last Clark(ish) bit, though: Did you read this weekend’s Times article on how psychedelic drugs can help the dying face death? Though Clark’s exhaustion after rounds of excruciating treatments helped him to accept his fate at the end, I think about the nightmares he had the week before he died, the pot smoke his lungs absorbed during the months he received treatment, and know this kind of thing would have eased his anxieties. Also, it probably would’ve given me a little comfort in the aftermath.
“I now have the distinct sense that there’s so much more,” said one patient, “so many different states of being. I have the sense that death is not the end but just part of a process, a way of moving into a different sphere, a different way of being.”
The first article after “The Talk of the Town” in this week’s New Yorker, which I lazily opened after propping myself up in bed a little early last night, inadvertently chronicles technical facets of my and Clark’s story.
The subhead for “The T-Cell Army” by Jerome Groopman reads “Can the body’s immune response help treat cancer?” and chronicles the phases of a clinical trial of the “adoptive cell transfer” Clark would have received had his cancer not ballooned in such a dangerous spot (in the very place doctors had resewed his intestines together) so quickly.
In the latest of three trials of patients with melanoma who underwent adoptive cell transfer at the National Cancer Institute, nine of twenty-five patients have been in complete remission for more than five years.
The article features an interview with Dr. Steven Rosenberg, who conceived of the treatment and once stood beside Clark and I as we told our story to the pack of researchers and doctors seated in a semicircle around us.
Later, Groopman writes of a man in remission. It is certainly effective for the piece to single out a man who once expected to live no more than six months and now thrives after receipt of this treatment. This man, like Clark, had melanoma in the lymph nodes of his left groin and lungs, but now he lives. Of course the focus of this advancement is on the victories, the moment when two pieces fit together in this tedious puzzle. Of hope for the future.
My story, though, is still not here, so I continue to write, though I take a moment to push through this feeling of being left behind.
So many feelings about this story of a man who killed his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife before killing himself last week.
While this story is ultimately tragic because two people lost their lives, and Charles Snelling’s act was clearly carried out in desperation, I don’t feel overwhelmingly sad about the deaths. I cried because of what he must have endured in those six years he took care of her as her mental state deteriorated.
Though he murdered her, the couple had been together for 55 years. I’m not sure if I feel that commitment justifies his actions, but he was the most equipped of anyone to make any call about her condition. I cannot assume to know, even slightly, the effects of watching the love of your life fade away like that.
I very much admire the Snelling family, who must be experiencing incredibly grief, but who issued a statement saying that Snelling had acted “out of deep devotion and profound love.”
“This lady rescued me from a fate worse than death, and for a long, long time,” Snelling wrote in a Times piece months before this incident, before deciding that for her to stay alive was worth than death. Would it had been brave of him to continue to care for her? Yes. But was he brave to decide not to? Yes.
