Today is November 11.

It's been eleven years since my father passed away today, though I remember it like it was yesterday: the stillness of that particular dawn, his last words, my first real experience with a death in the family.

And then there were some things that followed. Nasty little things that made wanting to forget easier.

And then...you get your wish, and you forget. Everything passed us by, and all that's left of my father are a couple of good and bad memories that maybe I'll keep until the day I give up the ghost and return to ashes. What I do remember about him is his voice, a kind of groggy voice (like Grover from the Muppet Show), and his habit of sitting at the dinner table and working on something, anything. And his fondness for the earth, which is why we used to have a vegetable garden and all sorts of plants and animals. The animal menagerie is still here, thanks to my brother, and I try to keep whatever plants I can grow.

Absence grows on you, I guess, and maybe out of sight really means out of mind. Humans are like that, fickle and fleeting, and I am human, and I forget rather easily. Or I think I forget.

To the man who gave me half of my chromosomal makeup and made my childhood more than the usual, I kind of miss you, and may your soul rest in peace forever.

Things on my mind

I feel really sad for the twelve-year old girl who hung herself out of desperation due to their family's impoverished existence. Poverty, like Robert Fulghum said, is one of those things not covered by what we learned in kindergarten: it's difficult to understand, especially when the rest of the world is sharing milk and cookies and taking afternoon naps.

I feel bothered, too, by the thought of losing a friend, just because one or both of us has crossed or is attemtping to cross some hazy line between friendship and God knows what else besides. I hope my fears are allayed forever.

I feel sad for a friend of a friend who turned out to be a real flake: we're not that close, but deception really sucks. I also feel sad for the many people he deceived, including some of my closest friends.

I don't know what I'm feeling for someone who holds it together: she's commendable and noteworthy on one hand because she doesn't let her emotions get the better of her, but she seems frozen and empty on another, because honesty is such a rare virtue nowadays.

I'm amused by what my adviser said to me today. She managed to inject humor into what would otherwise have been a humiliating circumstance on my part. For that, she gets an award. Seriously.

I'm thankful that the runaway truck that disassembled itself a la Transformers and let loose the wrath of its chassis on the parked cars in front of the cafe my friends and I were having coffee in didn't hit us:it was the perfect Change Topic card, and it gave us all reasons to be thankful to be alive.