"No matter how cloudy the sky gets, the sun always comes back out." -Jesse

I was writing a Pretty Person of the Week about Matt Damon but...

I realized I missed a very important date. And in some ways that's good. But in other ways it's not so much.
I feel kinda like an asshat for missing this. But it's alright. Muse was late too. Only six days but that's beside the point. The point is we had the same excuse: we were living, which is what Jessee wants us to do. We weren't spending the day grieving for her, which I'm sure is exactly what she didn't want.

We weren't grieving, but we remembered her. As we do every day. The most important part though? We weren't thinking of her tragic passing, we were thinking about the lessons she taught us while she was alive.

Oh shit, now I'm teary eyed. It's been like three sentences! Those waterworks...can't get a break...

I think the biggest regret I have about June 13 this year isn't that I didn't write about her. It's that I didn't log onto Utopia Skye or Yahoo! Messenger at all. Utopia Skye was the online community that she, Muse, and I (and several others) formed out of our shared addiction -- however geeky -- of MMORPGs. I should have seen that everyone else she knew and loved was doing the same. More than that, I should have sent an IM to Al, her fiance. He's a strong guy, but I know how much he appreciates the support we give.

Now, I'm sure some of you remember the last time I talked about Jessee. I won't repeat that story. I have one to share...I just adore telling it.

As I said, she and I were sick at the same time and we helped each other through our rougher days. We had a lot of ways we cooked up of escaping reality and just being happy, free, fun-loving people living life when in fact both of us were very very sick and death was really a tangible thing for both of us. We had different approaches to dealing when we were apart -- she tried to make a difference in the world with the time she had left (and she succeeded) while telling us about what fun things she would do when she got better (some of which she did despite not getting better), and I pretended like I was immortal and this was just a stumbling block (which turned out to be true).

We learned quickly that this morbid fact was not the only thing we had in common. We had friends in common, online anyways. We had our online games in common. Most importantly, we had dessert in common.
We frequently talked about life -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.
More often than not, we went on adventures. We would create stories about she and myself in our desperate search for the perfect cake. Thus was born the adventures of Jessee the Cake Bandit!!!
Yes, it sounds weird, but remember: both of us were ridiculously heavily medicated pretty much all of the time. It explains a lot.
Of course, such adventures were sometimes too good not to post on the Utopia Skye forums...so they are preserved for all. I was going to post one such adventure, but I can't decide which to do....
There was the PB&J fiasco -- one of many where we actually were rivals.
Or there's the entire episode of the thread on the forums that had no topic.
And there was the time we went shopping for new bodies...
And when we tried to go an adventure, but couldn't think of any ideas which led to an adventure in and of itself....
Or the time Jessee tried to get me to play There which was kind of a disaster -- at least for the elephant.
Then there was that time Jessee accidentally got me abducted by evil aliens.
And when Jessee thought my birthday was on June 7th....which was actually good because she got to say happy birthday and she didn't get to say it on the real day. :(
And there was that epic battle of me vs. Jessee over the waffles, a battle which ultimately cost Aunt Jemima and Little Debby their freedom.
And we can never forget that time we made a fairy tale...The King Who Lost His Emu. A classic.

I'm gonna let you guys decide which story you want me to share.

Anyways, there's some pictures that Jessee drew scattered throughout this post. Yahoo! Messenger has a Doodle thing....she loved it. :)
And some other significant pictures too.

She always told Muse (and later on, myself and our friend Tony) about this beach she would dream of, where she still had her long beautiful hair that had been ravaged by her chemotherapy. She was so peaceful there, it was her favorite place to go.
Of course, it wasn't a physical place, it was a fantasy dream world....a nice little paradise to escape to. I know that's where she is now, and she's probably brushing her hair, and eating cake, ice cream, donuts, pie, PB&J sandwiches (the way my mother makes them, not hers! :-P) and drinking soda (not pop!) and milk with cookies -- all without gaining any weight. I hope she's also getting a nice swim in between bites (cause I know she doesn't have to wait to swim at this beach, what's the paradise in that??)!

PS Muse, I'm sure everyone would love to celebrate any number of things when the radio is running for MuseCon this year, I hope Spider's recovery will be primary among them. :)

Across the Wires

Warning: Parts of this post are probably going to be super emotional. I might even cry...but keep that on the down-low for me. :-P
Also, I'm really Attention Deficit today.

Today, and yesterday, there was a rumble going on in this particular niche of the blog-o-sphere that I seem to have placed myself in. It's a very comfortable niche, I have to say. If it were a room, we'd have expensive, cushy leather couches, I think.
Anyways, the point is...there was a rumble. That's my word for -- no, not for a gang fight, that's West Side Story -- for an event everyone talks about. You know how when everyone is whispering to each other in one place and you don't know what they're saying (yet) it's kind of this rumbling noise caused by the voices? That's why I call it a "rumble".

I've lived through a lot of rumbles. Oddly enough, I usually have a feeling that a rumbling is going on before I hear anything about it. I mean, just for instance, the night of Station Nightclub Fire -- probably the biggest tragedy to happen in Rhode Island in...well, possibly ever, was a definite rumble for months afterwards. The night it happened I couldn't sleep, so I went downstairs to get a drink and discovered my dad had turned on the news. It was about 11:00. He and I watched the news for another 10 minutes, discussing our mutual inability to sleep even though we both had to be up at 6 the next morning (I can't for the life of me remember why). At about 11:10 the news switched to live coverage of the fire.
"Oh," I said, "I wonder if that's why we couldn't sleep."
As it turns out, we weren't unique. From the people I talked to about it, it seems like most of Rhode Island couldn't sleep that night.

Anyways, enough of my off-topic story telling. The blog-o-sphere has had a rumble. And when I logged onto Blogger yesterday, before I opened anyone's blogs, I had that sort of feeling. I've had it before, you know. When someone you know isn't totally alright and you know you're about to find out. You've had that nagging feeling all day, and you know you're about to find out because the feeling just jumped from the back of your mind to the point where you can't think of anything else.
So I went down my blogroll. It didn't take long before I found out who it was. Everybody who's reading this, please keep Spider in your thoughts and prayers.
(I particularly like this spider in this picture because, yes, it's still a spider, but it's actually not ugly.)
Anyways, I've read about this event in Spider's life on, I think, four blogs (five counting this one...) and each one has had tons of comments from other bloggers, many of whom I can only assume are talking about it on their blogs which I haven't read.

It reminds of me of something. I bet Muse is already thinking of it. The episode I'm about to tell you of probably had an even bigger effect on her than it did me. It's a lot more serious than what happened to Spider (not that I'm minimalizing what Spider's going through, I'm really not!)
See, the moral of this event I'm about to describe is that the people we talk to online, even though we've never met them, have a profound effect on our lives. And we, in turn, have a profound effect on them. Even though we've never seen each other face-to-face, we are friends, acquaintences, and in some cases enemies in a very real sense.
And much like the real world, it can sometimes take something unfortunate to prove that. The number of people pulling for Spider right now seems to support this idea too.

Anyways, this story will bring together everything that I've talk about in this post. I promise.
See, the online community Utopia Skye (which used to be much more active, and which I used to be much more active in when I had more free times) began in the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs). And, as sort of silly as a ton of people think it is, our starting point was in the game The Sims Online (TSO).
As an aside, I'd like to point out that when I played the most was during my Crohn's flare ups and I couldn't move and stress made the pain worse, so I'm forgiven from the extreme dorkiness of playing a MMORPG where you don't kill things. :-P
Back to the story though...one of the members of the Utopia Skye community, and a fellow player of TSO went by the name of Jessee (or Jessi). She was terrible at typing and, at first, annoyed the hell out of me because she just couldn't type anything right sometimes. She grew on me though, and she was always giving me advice and words of wisdom and so on and so forth. She was also always a lot of fun...like in this picture where our friend Tony trapped Jessee on the toilet? Or the one below, where Jessee is cheating at pool? Yeah, amazing. Good times, good times.
So one Thursday I had that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I was talking about earlier. I went through the whole day without hearing anything. I got home from school, hopped online and found out immediately what was going on.
Jessee, as it turned out, had only told a few of us (not including myself, unfortunately) that she had cancer. That day she had gone into a coma. I was told that the doctors weren't sure whether or not she'd come out of it. (And here come the tears...geez.)
Her fiancee came online from her hospital room and let Utopia Skye know. At the time, Utopia Skye also had an Internet radio station so we did a two day long radio broadcast in honor of Jessee, and her fiancee played the whole thing in her room. Her family was there too. We all listened, we all posted our well-wishes.
She was back to us by the end of the weekend. Later she told me that she could hear the whole thing, although it sounded like it was underwater.

There's so many more stories about Jessee and so much more to say buttt, we'll save those for other days.
The point is, the way everyone is pulling for Spider in his time of need right now, despite the fact that most of us have never met him, reminded me of that. I mean, like I said, it's not as serious. Spider's still awake, and cheery from what I've been hearing (which is great!) and if we were to do a radio broadcast for him* (and he had a computer with him in his hospital room) he'd hear it like everyone else would.

*Hi, that's not a bad idea. Anybody or able to afford a radio station?

"If you didn't know then now you know!"

I am posting this now, mid-studying, because I have been waiting all day to get the pictures from this weekend but I think everyone else slept today. Must be nice. :-P

Anyhow, I am definitely going to put a number of the pictures up when I do get them (probably tomorrow night). It has been quite the weekend though, definitely.

First I had a very typical Friday. I worked at abercrombie from 8 am to 1 pm, and went back to campus. I was busy with random end-of-the-semester things, and hanging out with friends who I never get to see these days, and utterly forgot about the nap I was supposed to get before I went to work at the club.

This guy was there, James, who I had met (and given my number to) the weekend before. Let's backtrack a second and take a look at why in the hell I'd give out my number to someone I met while I was working: I was up on stage, it was getting towards the end of the night and this giant of a man -- total stud, but still, ginormously tall and built! Oh God is he built! -- and he politely goes "Can I dance with you?" in this totally gentlemanly way and of course I'm like "Yes!"
So then we danced together...and even though I was just in my underwear, he didn't let his hands wander to anywhere that the skeezy old guys let their hands wander. And he was just...he was just this huge gentleman, and it was great.

So he was at the club with a friend of his (Brad) on Friday too, and I danced with them at the end of the night. And then, yesterday, James and I went to Park City together. Then we went to dinner together.

Last night I had a couple options for what to do before going to the club. One was to go to this dance recital that our school's dance club puts on, and a lot of my friends were in it. The other was to go to the birthday party for my new friend Jenny, who I really only officially met (although we knew of each other for long before we met) a week or so ago. So I went to the birthday party, and I brought James along as my date.

We hung out in the hotel until we all had to vaminose (I don't know if that's a real word but it sounds like a foreign word for "go" so...I use it :-P) to the club. We got there, Mike and I got into our undies, and then we got up on stage while the rest of the party headed up to their V.I.P. balcony lounge (where Mike and I went for all our breaks).
A good time was had by all, much clothing was removed from various party-goers...and for some reason, the masses of unintelligent club-goers tipped some of the party-goers who weren't working -- even though they had pants on. As I said about four times "It's not hard. The people wearing pants aren't employees and should not be tipped. The people who aren't wearing pants should be tipped." Still, I think I made pretty good money.

We returned to the hotel around 2:30/3:00 am and we partied for a few more hours. I won't lie, I got a little bit drunk....fortunately, James was there to hold my attention so I wasn't too slutty -- that's always a risk when there's me and alcohol. He really is a gentleman and he cuddled with me all night, which kept me busy enough to not go into the whatever-was-going-on-in-the-other-room...they had the door shut.

Morning came and it was just James, Josh, Jenny, Neil, Scotty, Sean, and myself left. We cleaned up as best as we could (pretty good if I do say so myself!) and hit the road. I brought Scotty to the train station -- he needed to take the train to Exton, so he could meet a friend, then go to Philly to catch a flight back to Oregon. Yeah, I know, long way for a party but it was called "East Meets West" for a reason -- he and Jenny have birthdays near each other so it was a dual party, and apparently they had the Portland chapter of it last weekend.

Anywho...then I came to Etown and finally got to talk to Boy-Craig. We hadn't talked at all this week, I'd been busy and he'd been...well, busy. He's still indecisive, up-down-all-around...and honestly, I'm getting very tired of it. We'll hang out over winter break and whatever happens will happen but I expect that will be the end of it.
(I know you're rejoicing over that one, Johnna. Sometimes I get a kick in the butt from my own common sense. :-P)

And then the truly bad news hit home.
The head of our theater department here, who is sort of a father figure to many of us, myself included, recently had brain surgery on a benign tumor. Unfortunately, when they opened up his skull...they discovered things are a lot worse than they thought. It's my arch-nemesis back and attacking someone else close to me: cancer.
He's a stubborn guy, tough as nails, and he's going to kick it's ass, I'm sure. There's some people that nothing can touch...Muse, Jackie, for instance. I think that Sevy (as we call him) is one of those people.
But then again, I thought that about my grandfather and Jessee (or read about her here). Still, both of them put up a good, an amazing fight and I know that Sevy will at least manage to make us proud. He still has a sense of humor -- actually, it may have even improved from when he was healthy :-P -- and he's still going to be around for us. He's turning himself into a family man, not a professor, but the theater department is one of his kids and he's going to make sure we're taken care of too.
I think we're all a little in shock. We all thought everything was fine since the surgery, we'd thought it was just the benign tumor. This was just kind of slammed on us tonight.

Credit to Jenny for the pictures! More pictures of our amazing weekend can be found on her website!