A post in haste.

It's not that I don't have more things of substance to write about other than posting pictures of my frivolous spending habits.

I've been meaning to sit down and tell you all about the beginnings of this final semester. Of how I sit and bite my lip sometimes, fighting back repressed emotions in my Asian American Studies class of all the pain and hurt I've felt by the ignorance of my fellow peers for the past four years. You try being a lower-class ethnic minority in an upper-middle class white university and not be affected. Or about coming to terms with myself as I work past the angry, bitter and sarcastic 5th year senior complex. I decided at some point that I didn't want to be mean and detached from my school. I'm still there. I still have a lot I can there. I ended up registering for classes that all come with emotional baggage of some kind. They are all personal and important, how did I think I could be detached?

And today.

Today I went to a funeral of the mother of a long-time friend who died because of cancer. I cried along with the hundreds of others in attendance. But I cried not so much for her, though I will always remember Auntie Kitty for her quirky joy, but more for how evident it seemed that others were hit with this sort of shattering sense of loss. Someone's mother. Someone's wife. Someone's best friend. Someone's teacher. The sobering finality of death has never left me unaffected, no matter how close or not I felt to that person. Death is death. While funerals do honor the life of the one who has passed on, they are just as much for those who are left here to deal with the loss. They are for me and you who need the rituals to help us process, maybe even make sense of it.

After the reception, my parents and I went to visit my grandpa in the hospital, who entered for emergency treatment of his failed kidney and liver. Well, at least that's what I gathered from the medical mumbjo jumbo I didn't quite understand despite many years of watching ER and Grey's Anatomy. When I see old people in pain and the constant deterioration of their bodies, I wonder what is the point of living? Wouldn't it be better to wish for death in this case? When they know death is imminent, do they fight against the inevitable anyways? Are they just trying to buy themselves a little more time?

Maybe I will find the courage to ask my grandpa these questions.