There are a ton of songs about Julia, but the one sticking in my head right now is John Lennon’s elegy to his mom. I can’t get it out of my head. It’s so haunting, so evocative of how I feel right now.

My friend Julia Case died last week. Some of you may have known her as mornhyland. She had a lot of diverse experiences in her life, a lot of wonderful things but also a lot of sorrow. She was deaf-blind, and suffered from bipolar disorder, PTSD, DID, and possibly other mental illnesses. She was in and out of mental hospitals pretty regularly, but underneath all that she was a brilliant mathematician who loved technology, and that’s what we frequently talked about. Every time I mused about wanting a new cell phone, she’d give me the lowdown because she knew all about those things. We talked about programming and other geek toys. She had an answer for techie questions I never thought anybody would know, and she had that answer ready within minutes of me posting to Twitter or LiveJournal.

Julia had been going through some hard times recently. She moved from Massachusetts to Oregon, and she broke up with her wife, to whom she was legally married (in Massachusetts anyway). She sent me a message on Twitter not long ago, so distraught over her breakup that she asked if she would make it through. I told her yes she would, because she was one of the strongest people I know. She had survived SO much. And really, things were starting to look up. She had interpreters in her college classes, she had just gotten a dog named Chance from Project Pooch, and I believe she was intending to train him as a service dog - guide or therapy, I’m not sure which. She had just gotten hearing aids (one day after I got mine) and was having a hard time adjusting to all the new sounds. She was also taking mobility training, learning how to guide herself with a white cane and so forth. She talked about wanting to learn Braille. I honestly thought things were looking up, but something was obviously wrong.

Julia took her own life on Wednesday, April 23, 2008. She was 39 years old. I will miss her very much.

After A went to bed about 11pm, I came downstairs and watched the last episode of Eleventh Hour, and this week’s L Word. I switched to regular TV and watched half an episode of Intervention, then X-Files and Outer Limits. I think the alarm upstairs will be going off in about 20 minutes; our flight leaves at 7:30am from National Airport so our cab is coming at 5:30. (We could take metro but I’m not confident we’d get there fast enough, and parking is expensive, so cab it is.)

I caught up on my LiveJournal and DeadJournal reading though not my blog reading yet. Unfortunately I found out that one of my best friends in the world got her heart completely ripped apart, so I’m aching for her. I wish I could call her up on VP but I doubt the free wifi at the hotel in Puerto Rico will be good enough for that. I did get my Palm Pilot and GPS synced up so that’s good, I can do geocaching on this trip.

I think I’m ready to go…I better be, right? The weather in San Juan is in the 70s and 80s. As of the minute I am writing this, it is currently 23°F in DC and 73°F in San Juan! Fifty degrees, damn. I can’t wait to get there, but I am going to miss my friends. I think I am going to be able to keep up with schoolwork, at least I hope so!

Oh, and I have a temporary seasonal theme up on my site, for those of you who read it elsewhere. When the season expires I will probably be making some changes to my design structure, whee!

There’s nothing to make a girl feel old like reading the mindset of most of her classmates. It totally shocks me that kids I attend class with don’t remember the Berlin Wall coming down, or the Soviet Union being a secret superpower that we were scared of, or Nelson Mandela being released from prison, or the Tiananmen Square massacre, or Burma! How can I possibly be that much older than half the people I know? I mean, I was only eight when a lot of that stuff happened, but I remember all of it! Of course I didn’t go see the Silence of the Lambs movie when I was a kid, but I definitely remember being grossed out by the poster and seeing it on the theater marquee. And I remember when I’d never even heard of Wal-Mart! I’m only 27, why am I so old?!?!

Hooray, today was the last day of classes! I still have to redo my research paper (I’ve got 3.5 pages out of 8 so far) and do my history final, math final, and ASL final. The math final is due on the 13th, the ASL final is due on the 10th, and the history final is due on the 11th. The research paper is also due on the 11th.

Also, on Monday, I have to take the English final, which is reportedly pretty easy. That’s at 5pm though - it was supposed to be at 6:30pm but I begged to have it moved up because I live at least an hour away. I also have to see the lady about writing for gBlog (thanks to_be_in_snafu!) and also do the course evaluation for ASL, which my teacher can’t figure out how to post online, apparently.

Oh, and I’m officially a sophomore! All of my credits transferred, which is 26.5, and 26 means you have sophomore standing. So YAY! Of course most of them transferred as elective credit, including the one I really wanted to transfer (a Deaf Studies class), but hey, 26.5 transfer credits is more than 0 transfer credits!

I’m going to miss all of my friends over the winter break, though. I’m hoping to see kawaiibishounen but no guarantees…he isn’t that far though, so hopefully we can meet in the middle or I can go visit him or he can come visit me, or something!

As much fun as I’m having in school, as many friends as I have right now, I’m still afraid. It’s not self-esteem this time. My good grades have done wonders for my self-esteem. It’s plain old insecurity.

Maybe part of this stems from not living on campus, but I’m afraid of losing my friends. What’s going to happen next semester? Next year? Will I find myself back in the land of having books as my only friends? Will I study hard and get good grades but find myself alone?

It almost makes me want to run away from school so I forget about the friends before they forget about me. But really, did I come to school for a social life, or for a degree? Shouldn’t I be happy getting A’s even without the friends? Is it just that I have something now that I’ve never had before (ie, friends) and I’m afraid of losing them?

School is my job now. I haven’t had a lot of friends in my previous jobs. Can’t I get by without them? Secretly eating my lunch in the Deaf Stacks of the library, hoping nobody catches me with the food? Or will I just work a lot more hours so I forget about it all?

Why am I so scared, dammit? Maybe I am worth keeping as a friend. I’m smart and I can give advice sometimes and I try to be nice to everybody. So why do I worry like this?

Everybody is going home for the holiday. One of my friends asked me if I was staying in town, and I said “um…I live here, so…yes. And my family lives here.” I am going to have dinner with my family on Thursday. I am kind of envious of all my friends making travel plans and being excited to go home - I don’t have anywhere to go! Although we did get confirmation today that the Los Angeles trip in January is definitely happening, so that’s fun. I’m sad that I won’t get to sign with anybody from Tuesday night until Monday morning though, everybody is going to be hearing all weekend, and I love my deaf friends. Two of them are going together to the house of one of their families, and I am jealous…I want to spend a whole week with my friends, too! Sometimes I hate living off campus. I have the most awesome friends but I have to leave them every night, blah. Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife and my kitties and my kitchen and my restaurants and all the other benefits of living at home…but I wish I could see my friends for longer and more often. Le sigh.

I am tired. Sleepy.
I realized the last couple of posts didn’t make it elsewhere because I had turned off both transfer plugins while I was tagging a bunch of old entries. Duh. They should be caught up now.
I had a fun time with my friend Robert tonight. I love him like bees love a flower.

Tomorrow I will be participating in the Alumni Bowl contest, playing for the “current students” team against the 1957 and 1982 teams. I’ve done some brushing up on my 1957 factoids but I haven’t done anything on 1982 yet. Oh well, I have a few free hours tomorrow, I’ll do it then. I was actually invited to be on the College Bowl team, but hearing students can’t participate in actual Academic Bowl activities, so I have to stick to the informal stuff.

I just looked through all the previous Academic Bowl teams and I am surprised how many of my friends were on them! I had no idea I had such a wonderful group of nerds around me. I loved It’s Academic, which is basically the same thing. Academic teams rock!

Yesterday, Saturday, was such a wonderful day. It started out when I overslept by an hour, but I hit the road and drove into the city to meet eyes_of_cyrene at her hotel. I got there at about 11:30, valet-parked the car, and spent the next 16 hours with one of my best friends, who I don’t get to see very often because she lives in Iowa! First we got something to eat, and went to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and did some shopping at Filene’s Basement, where I got a new purse. We went back to her hotel and chatted for a while, and then we went to dinner in Chinatown. She taught me about beer! I have no idea what all I had - this was at RFD and we got lots of samples - but the one I liked the best basically tasted like raspberry juice. (She said - “yeah, except this will get you drunk!”)

We had leftovers when we were done with dinner, so we were going to take them up to the room and then go back down to the hotel bar for another drink. But she realized she’d forgotten her hat at the restaurant, so we went back and picked it up, and then went to the hotel bar. I ordered a “chocolate covered cherries” drink, and I remember it had Godiva liqueur and Smirnoff Black Cherry Twist in it, but there was something else that I don’t remember. Oh, and at no time during the night did I get carded - Gretchen said it was because we were signing, and they assumed I was deaf, and they didn’t want to deal with asking for my ID. (Or hey, I didn’t get carded Friday night either, maybe I finally look old enough to not get carded?) Anyway, we also got shots of the new Bailey’s Flavors…the caramel was very good but the mint chocolate was nothing to write home about.

When the hotel bar closed, we went back to her room and chatted for another couple of hours, and then we took a three-hour nap before it was time to get up so I could take her to the airport! Oh my god, I had such a fabulous time. I seriously did not want to take her to the airport…I wanted to keep her here! I don’t have a huge number of people that I am really close to, and virtually none of them live in the DC area. I had so much fun.

Today was a rather LiveJournally day. I didn’t sleep well, so I was kind of out of it for most of the morning and just goofing off. I suddenly realized I was late for tikva’s birthday lunch at Oriental East in Silver Spring. Obviously dim sum is not a favorite treat for me due to the few vegetarian options, but I do like sesame balls and pineapple buns so I didn’t mind going - I figured I could always get something after if I was still hungry. I got there about half an hour late but I wasn’t the last one there, although I was the only latecomer who was late due to carelessness and not previous engagements! Anyway, I got to meet three new friends, bringing the total number of people on my friends list that I have met to 56! (That’s about one-third if you drop out the duplicate journals and the journals written by cats, even though I have met both of the cats with journals.) I really enjoyed these people - zaph and I seem to have a fair bit in common in terms of personality, if not necessarily interests; I found him quite interesting to talk to. antuvschle was kind of quiet compared to the rest of us chatterboxes, but she seems really cool, she lives in the town where I grew up, and she gives hugs the first time you meet her! (Now that’s cool.) I was a little bit intimidated by sskipstress, probably because she is both pretty and intelligent and I always wonder how people who impress me are perceiving me when we interact. It was a very good lunch overall - I did get enough to eat! - even though I missed seeing tikva’s guide dog Brodie, who was at home.

Tonight I spent a while completely revamping my LiveJournal design. I decided to go back to S1, the style system that I actually understand, and I used a design from Open Source Web Design to make a unique look for myself. Returning to S1 means I don’t get attractively-formatted talk pages, but I will probably stick with it for a while. If you want to see the new design, check it out here. I was pretty pleased with the way the Flickr badges came out; you can’t use the usual badge generator because Livejournal won’t allow Javascript but rd84 created a scriptless badge generator!

It occurs to me that there are some people I haven’t heard from in a while who probably don’t realize I’m still thinking about them often and wondering how they’re doing.

preppyperv	aleja	Halsted
gwenzilla	Gilmore	boiswillbebois
oh_chris	zille	Richard
DustyWolfe	Becky	dayzeeedogg

…they are but a few of the friends I miss.