Ch-Ch-Ch-Chaaange-es
- My mother, Nancy, "Mama", battled valiantly with colorectal cancer from 2016 to 2022. I could not bring myself to write an obituary, just a poem. She was the most amazing woman I've ever known, and there just isn't a lot you can say, you just stand in wordless wonder.
My mother, Nancy
- Turns out my Dad, Todd, "Daddy", has MS (multiple sclerosis), but he's also dealing valiantly and I'm hopeful he'll be around for a long while. I needed Mama to be around, too, but I'm managing.
- My brother Shane is doing OK. He recently had a poem published about Annie Oakley that made it as an exhibit in the Annie Oakley museum.
- I have two master's degrees, MS Physics, MA Philosophy.
Me Now. (It's just me)
- In June 2022 (on the 24th, bye-bye Roe v. Wade), I started dating a lovely "young man" as my father calls him (he's in his forties, 9 years my senior). Lu Semita. He is "tall, dark and handsome", plays bass and drums, sings, draws, paints, sketches, animates, mountain bikes, surfs and runs, cooks, does project management stuff (software engineering / AI), ran an alternate reality game that was pretty popular, and he has an open-mindedness, rationality, sense of wonder and awe about the universe, a spirituality and a childlike sense of fun. He's very well read and intelligent, and he has led a very interesting life.
Heavily stylized portrait of Lu and I
Lu, concealing his good features with a smoke ring
- Lu and I first met April 11, 2018, and we both liked each other immediately. We got to know each other mostly conversing on various Facebook threads, and we had some kind of tension, but we didn't really explore it. He appeared at an anticlimactic time in my life, though I had at the time a sinking floating feeling: "Oh. There he is. NOW..." (not quite "when I'm this", like the Last Unicorn, but almost...) the first moment I was aware of him.
- I spoke to my mother about him vaguely, that June. "Did you make him feel better?" she asked, concerned about him (he was in a transitional time in his life). "Yes," I said. But I didn't discuss that we were dating, and I feel bad-- an almost guilt-- because it would have completed a discussion we had about love. She believed when the right person is there, it works, and that I would meet that person. I have communed with her in various in-between spaces, which I am not above valuing or believing in, but it's a different kind of exchange, and the physical one left hanging.
- I have told my father about Lu, had the "hey I've met the one" talk, and mostly via my intermediary texting, they discuss nature, "the land", fishing, Formula 1, and other things.
- Lu and I are engaged, although life circumstances (my school stuff, his job stuff and some other details) are keeping us long distance for the meanwhile. Which is also OK. We plan to marry and live together in the future.
- I've basically completed my dissertation, which is in edits (although things got complicated due to a Title IX nightmare that blew up just after my mother died when I was vulnerable, that I'm still sorting through.)
- I completed orientation with the Secular Franciscan Order (Brother Jacoba fraternity). They encourage me to complete my dissertation and doctorate and then continue study. I want everything "deeper" I suppose. I'm not a once on Sunday Catholic, but I am also my own being, and I explore spirituality in my life as an individual, not just as a Catholic yet always to some extent as a Catholic, but my Catholicism and the Franciscan charism have been deeply important to me.
- I'm overwhelmed looking at all the Catholic stuff you're supposed to do prior to marriage. Maybe we'll just go marry each other in the woods (which is apparently legal in both Kansas and California) or have my brother or Dad marry us and then get "con-validated" later. I'm fairly progressive as a Catholic, but I still want to do things "right".
- I am still close to my friends Amanda and Theo (who I met in college when he used a different name). I have made new friends, online and in real life, at St John's and Tekakwitha House. I have a good community of kind people around me in my life.
- Despite the horror of the greatest loss I've ever experienced (...last March, I had a breakdown where I tried to bring my mother back to life scattering some of her ashes in our front garden...), I'm Okay, and I'm very grateful for the beauty in life and all the good things I'm experiencing.