Birthdays and anniversary

Filed under: Birthdays, Death, Writing
5 Comments

More and more, lately, it seems like I have both happy and sad things to post about on the same day. I'm never quite sure how to handle that. I don't want either to detract from the other, but I also don't want to swamp y'all with a whole bunch of really short entries on the same day. And anyway, I'm not sure that several entries in close succession is any better for avoiding detracting from each other than one entry lumping things together.

Case in point: this time of year I'm always happy at all the birthdays. Laura a couple days ago, Tamara yesterday, Chaos and Jenn today, Mary Shelley tomorrow, E.B. on Thursday, Theo and Stephen this coming weekend. Yay for birthdays! Happy birthdays to all of you.

And of course there's always WorldCon this time of year, and the sixth anniversary of the launch of Strange Horizons is coming up in three days.

But then again, today is the sixth anniversary of Alex's death.

I'm really tired, and I have a lot of magazine stuff yet to do before I go to sleep tonight, and I haven't worked on those memorial pages in ages, so I don't have a lot to say about that just now. I think I'll leave it with a link to a similar entry from three years ago. Never enough time to say everything I want to say.

But I think I'll take this anniversary as impetus to get moving again on the Folkdance story, which is only tangentially related to Alex, but enough so that perhaps I can use the excuse to finish it up and send it out. It's been languishing for months, entirely untouched, even though it's very close to being as done as I can make it. So I'll try and make that one of my projects for this coming weekend. Along with reading about three weeks' worth of backlogged submissions.

5 Responses to “Birthdays and anniversary”

  1. Twig

    Ah, you didn’t mention Alex while I was there. I woulda offered you extra hugs. I met him when he was out visiting at one point. We had some interesting conversations (though sadly I don’t remember much of them now, but I remember thinking I’d gladly spend more time talking to him).

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  2. Chaos

    I’m never sure what to do about that either. I always think about Alex (who i also met in person only once) on my birthday.

    After Hurricane Katrina hit last year (that anniversary is also yesterday, for those playing the home game), i wondered if i might rather skip it entirely and pick a different day to celebrate in future, but decided against — i like my birthday. Instead, i went out for an excellent but low-key dinner with a couple of friends, and we talked environmentalism (all whining, no solutions, as usual) over steak.

    We know too many people, and the calendar year is too short, to expect to tease these things apart. Until we evolve the ability to be in two unrelated moods simultaneously, i think one pretty much has to celebrate the happy while acknowledging the sad, and hope for the best.

    At any rate, thanks for the birthday wishes. Also, ::hugs::

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  3. jaipur.livejournal.com

    Huh–I thought Alex was on the 28th? I had that pegged as happening on my mother’s birthday. Just goes to show how everything morphs over time. He usually shows up in a dream round about this time every year; I have a vague memory he was with some group of people in one of my dreams recently, but I can’t swear to it. Ah well. 🙂 But you should finish that Folkdance story before you forget who-all was involved. 😉

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  4. Jed

    Twig: Yeah, during the time that you were around on Tuesday I was thinking about yard/garden stuff, so didn’t think to mention Alex. But thank you for the retroactive extra hugs.

    Chaos: meeps on assorted bad stuff on your birthday. But yeah, birthday celebrations good, even (or sometimes especially) low-key ones. And yes, good point about calendar years being too short to separate these things. (And if they were longer, then birthdays would come less often, and that would be bad!)

    Jaipur: Jim sent out the email on the evening of August 29th; the best guess at the time was that Alex had died that morning. I’m not sure if that was amended later to the 28th; I don’t have the energy to go back through all those emails to check. Alex called me and you on the evening of the 28th, so it was either later that night or the next morning. He had a doctor’s appointment on the morning of the 29th, but I think we eventually established that he didn’t go to that. But my memory is hazy on all this; it could well be that time of death was eventually established as being the night of the 28th.

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  5. Laura A

    Thanks for the birthday wishes! It’s very nice to have my birthday remembered by friends. My family isn’t so good at birthdays, so online notes like this mean a lot to me.

    I was in Paris at a conference when Alex died. I didn’t find out until a week later when I got back home and found the many many e-mail messages. I had sent Alex a postcard from Paris because I suspected that he was unhappy and in need of contact. At the time the futility of the postcard and the fact that it was way too little way too late upset me a lot. I wonder if his parents ever got it.

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