89 years

I sit in a room with my dying grandfather.

The only sounds are his rhythmic breathing and the soft ticking of the clock on the wall. The sun has gone down, and the cheery light no longer filters through the blinds. The harsh fluorescent light in the room contrasts sharply with the rural North Carolina darkness outside. There is only a single light in the room, and it brightly illuminates my grandmother's snow white hair and brings a greenish tint to her wrinkled skin.

Two of my aunts are here as well, as well as my mom and dad. My brother is away in Michigan, and had the same reaction I did when I heard the news: a vaguely apprehensive confusion.

Grandpa had a stroke? Say what...?

The doctors said that he had only a few hours left, so we all rushed here as fast as we could. But hours pass, and he lies in the hospital bed underneath the fluorescent light, and his breathing continues, rhythmic and strong. My aunts are back in the room now, and the conversation has resumed. Mom wears her usual look of unflappable calm, though it is tempered by empathy today: the Chinese believe that the separation of soul and body that occurs when a person dies is acutely painful, and that a dying person ought not to be touched or spoken to.

"A mountain sits on his chest," she tells me softly, where the others cannot hear, and tells me of the Chinese belief that a dying person is scoured by earth, water, fire, and wind before passing away. Wind is the final phase, she says, and the most painful. "Ah mi tuo fuo," she says, repeating the Buddhist prayer quietly, musically. "Ah mi tuo fuo. That is all you should say." She turns away, and walks down the hall, continuing to pray for him.

I return to the room, where the bright sound of Dancing With the Stars blares from the TV, and stare at grandpa's sunken cheeks. He will never regain consciousness, they told me, and he has no chance of recovery. So we are here to make him comfortable, and stare at him and each other as we wait for him to die.

Roadtrip!

This is the tentative plan, anyway! I've been trying to figure out how much time I ought to allot for this trip. At first I thought a month would be wayyy too long, but when I break it down:

- 2 days to get to NYC (probably a stop-over and some hiking on the Blue Ridge Parkway somewhere)
- 2 or 3 days with Doug in Brooklyn
- 1 day to get to Niagara Falls
- 2 or 3 days with James in Michigan
- 1 day to Wisconsin
- overnight at Aunt Ellen's, then 1 day to get to the Badlands
- 3 days hiking and camping at the Badlands
- 1 day to Yellowstone/Grand Teton
- 4 or 5 days combined hiking and camping
- 1 day to Arches/Glen Canyon
- 3 or 4 days combined hiking and camping
- 1 day thru Monument Valley and to the Grand Canyon
- 3 days at the Grand Canyon
- 1 day to get to Las Vegas
- 1 day in Vegas
- 1 day to the Sierra Nevada
- 1 day hiking
- 1 day to San Francisco

...add that up and that's 29-33 days total. So if I leave on June 30th, that should be about perfect for an August 1st arrival in SF.

Everything's still up in the air, of course!

Blurbs

I made an A in my QM2 class!

I graduated.

I went dirt biking, which was awesome.

I went for an all-day hike at Fort Yargo. I need to hike more often.

I read up a bit on rock climbing. Always thought that would be a really cool hobby. Gonna call Atlanta Rocks! tomorrow to set up an intro lesson so that I can climb on my own!

Realized that flying lessons probably are not going to work out this summer (again!). Just not enough money, and the discounted lessons didn't come through after all.

Set a date for my move-in to SF: August 1st, which gives me a little under a month to explore the city before classes start.

Setting up my Grand Crazy Road Trip for the summer, en route to SF, which I'm planning on drawing out for at least a few weeks. At the very least, I'm thinking of hitting up Philadelphia, to see my cousin Joel, NYC, and maybe staying with Doug for a few days, Michigan, to see Niagara Falls and hang out with my bro for a few days, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, just cuz they'd be awesome. Gotta go up into Canada for a bit, just to say I've been to the country. Grand Canyon would be nice, even though I went there before. Definitely gotta go on a long drive up the coast highway in Cali.

I'm tentatively planning to leave my job on June 20th, then spend a week or two with my parents, before heading west (well, north, first, but ultimately west!). I'm thinking July 1st would be a nice round date to leave on...

Finally got a response from my research advisor! He has approved my program and methods, and now I've just got to assemble the paper. Hello publication number 2!

James says he's going to buy Civ 4. Yes! I'll finally have someone to play Civ with!

Blizzard's coming out with a big game announcement on the 19th. If it's not Starcraft 2, there will be much moaning and gnashing of teeth.

I'm getting pretty burned out on World of Warcraft. Just hit level 63, and I realized that I'm not having that much fun...

Decided that I think that the WoW version of l33tspeak is hilarious. L2blog, nubcakes lololol!!!1!1one1!!roflcopter

Watched James play Dawn of War the other day. Daaaaamn, that game looks cool! Might pick that up.

Broke up with the girl I've been seeing. That sucked. But she was leaving for Europe in about 20 days, and I was leaving for Cali before she got back, so our relationship would have ended then anyway. Drawing it out was starting to feel very pointless and lame.

But I generally like being single. Guess I'm sort of a solitary guy, so being alone again's fine with me.

Bought a new mouse! Corded laser mouse with 5 buttons. 2000 dpi! Don't know exactly what that means, but the tracking resolution seems very nice. Yay mouse.

Isabel's coming back in a few days. Heard from her for the first time in a while a couple of days ago. That'll be neat. She seems to have had a really miserable time in DC, and is re-enrolling at UGA in the fall.

Developing a bit of an issue with acne. Kinda let my diet go there at the end of the semester. Hopefully it'll clear up now that I'm back to eating relatively healthy stuff.

Decided that I like Ron Paul quite a bit as a presendential candidate, and that Obama might be a bigger douche than he seemed originally. 'Equivalent work,' lol. Kinda hoping Paul wins the Republican nomination, and Richardson wins the Democratic. Not that either has a chance in hell of happening. It'd be neat, though.

Decided that Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) is a lame hypocrite. Really don't care for his modus operandi of pretending to have this 'I link, you decide!' neutral attitude, but linking to the most partisan bullshit you can possibly imagine. Feel the same way about Rand Simberg, although he at least is fairly upfront about what his opinions are. Guys, stop pretending you're independents (or libertarians) when 95% of what you say is just shilling for the Bush Administration, 'kay?

I'm looking forward to leaving Athens, more than pretty much anything in the world right now. Gotta go gotta go gotta go. Over the past year or so I've really come to realize just how intensely I dislike the South and the attitudes of people in this part of the country.

In the same vein: frat boys. Why am I living in a place where like 2/3rds of the people I meet are bigoted, asshole fratties? To hell with these guys, seriously.

I feel like I really ought to do something remarkable this summer, since it's my last summer that I'll have off, and I actually have some money for once! There's the road trip...but, I dunno. I kind of want to fly off to Australia or China or somewhere really far away and just explore for a while, before school starts. China probably wouldn't be a good idea, since my Mandarin sucks, but... I don't know if I really want to blow all that money to go to a place like Australia. Hmm...

That's pretty much all my thoughts...for the time being, at least.

Fin

Well...I'm done.

That final was pretty brutal, and it did, in fact, take almost the whole week to finish. I think I probably made a low to mid B on it...so I have no idea what my grade is in the class, but I'm pretty sure I passed, which is what matters.

Still kind of waiting for it to sink in!