tetrapartite maundering

[dichroic]

First, there’s an update at the expat-life blog so I don’t need to double-post about us being asked by a cute Taiwanese kid if we dye our hair lighter, or about my trying out a local foot-massage place.

Second, we have a race in Ilan this weekend. We were told this one is for “adults”; I think that means college students or national teamers. I think this will be another one like this:

S                             every
T                             one
A                             else
R             me
T

but oh, well, it’s good practice anyway.

Third, I just read the saddest obituary ever, about the former colleague I mentioned the other day. Who knows, maybe I’m projecting. Maybe he had a loving but nontraditional family and they just didn’t want details in the newspaper. Knowing the hours he worked, I doubt it, but I hope I’m wrong. (And there is the whole suicide thing, though that’s an unreliable indicator - the last suicide I knew was a beloved friend, mother and grandmother (not mine).) Still, I think I’m going to have a word with my spouse. If my obit can’t say I was greatly loved, I hope it at least says I did interesting stuff.

Fourth, while commenting on someone else’s choices of glasses today, I realized that I really do still think of myself as a Glasses Person. Odd, because of the thirty-nine years I wore corrective lenses (out of forty-two - thirty eight, really, because I didn’t need them the year I was nine), I wore contacts all or most of the time for about twenty years. But you still feel them there. I’m not used to naked eyes.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Comments

[bronze_ribbons]

I actually wouldn't assume anything from the obituary. Newspapers do charge by the word for them, and I've definitely noticed a trend (because I read aloud 20-40 of them every Monday morning for the Talking Library) toward the terse. (One local funeral home doesn't even provide specifics beyond the name and date of death anymore -- every single listing says "see www.______.com for full obituary.") When my friend Bob died, very much beloved and with a fascinating career, the family listed only the service date in the newspaper but had a full obituary printed in the funeral program.

(...I suspect quite a few people may not realize how much even a short obituary costs, judging from a complaint I heard about when a younger colleague died last fall. Never mind how much it sucks trying to pull together the relevant info on short notice (i.e., less than 36 hours after losing one's relative or friend, when one may well be fried out of one's mind from travel and/or exhaustion). ... Which is actually to encourage you not only to talk with Rudder about it (and your parents, for that matter, if this is the kind of conversation you can have with them), but to jot down key things to include. (Though, now that I think about it, me not knowing my grandparents' formal names is anomalous.))