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Just Shut UP.

I only have 7 days left of my job, and two things are happening: one: the days are going by SO. SLOW. Two: I am getting really nervous. I want to be excited, and I AM, but it’s just hard to walk away from a great job, from the best co-workers EVER, from security, from Health Insurance. I know that I’m doing the write thing, and how my summer is filling up with deadlines and the like, I really don’t know how I would have managed both. But, my worst fear is that 6 months down the line I’ll need a job again and will end up stuffing gift bags and a Bridal Magazine party for ten dollars an hour or wearing a rented tux and opening doors. True Stories.

Oh well, here’s to a leap of faith, and to the Future!!

fyi, that lamb is taking a Leap of Faith. It’s a metaphor, okay? Is there a massive, angry river below him? Or a hungry dinosaur? Or: is it soft, pleasant Grass?

 Please, let it never be said that I am not a warrior; a daredevil. For I went snow-shoeing.

Hunter mountain was packed with extreme sport-ers, jetting down risky slopes named after skiiers who were killed on them. And while they looked judgingly at our weird foot-pieces, as they yelled ‘WRONG WAY!’ as we went DOWN the ski lift,  I am sure they were really just jealous of the peace, tranquilty and non-death we found on our snow-shoe trails.

God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay:

The airports are now more rigorously using full body scanners that sure, are invasive, but it’s totally worth it, and even a good excuse to be less fat

To save us all from Certain Death by bomb in the sky

Oh tidings of comfort and joy

(Comfort and Joy)

Oh tiding of comfort and Joy.

(Also, is that guy wearing a man thong?)

Ya’ll I’mbout ta get real deep. Like REAL deep. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about fear, and subsequently, about Heaven. I’ve been working on my Naked Angels play, which is about a Happy woman who witnesses a random tragic death, and becomes increasingly afraid of everything (this just in: this is incredibly tricky to dramatize.)

Anywhoo, the idea for the play stems for the fact that in the last 2 years or so? I’ve suddenly become very scared of things. Plane Crashes, subway bombs and the like. The fear has not become like CRIPPLING by any means, but it just sort of haunts me like an epitaph.

And so, I ask myself, or you? or the play asks – what do we do with this fear? Fear of losing your life in some random, tragic way?  I guess if you don’t believe in heaven, of life beyond life on earth, there is nothing more terrifying than losing your life. But – if you DO believe in heaven, there is this comfort that there is life and meaning after ‘death,’ and this is comforting, and thusly, fear is suspended, and we all lived happily ever after, peacefully riding mass transit. Key word being Peace. And so, I ask myself*, or You, why would you ever not believe in heaven? Regardless of how you choose to live your life, why wouldn’t you believe in something so liberating? Discuss.

*I definitely do.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the ‘anxiety box,’ which I just found on the internets. Disturbing, metaphor, or both?

I was just going to say: I’m usually a fairly mellow person (or maybe I’m not? You tell me!) but every now and then, my heart starts racing with a mix of worried anticipation and joyful dread, for no specific reason whatsover. I either drink way too much coffee – or –  have some 7th sense of things that are yet to come. (My 6th sense being that I can FEEL it when the office phone is about to ring. Like  I really, really can.)

I think I may be ‘growing up’ or something or at least ‘accepting the inevitable.’ When I first started making my student loan payments each month I felt VIOLENTLY AND VICIOUSLY ROBBED. Like robbed, and punched in the face. Gradually, though, I think I’ve found peace with it, and now, more calmly hand it over each month, like c’est la vie, Brunstetter. You made your debt bed. Now lie upon it.

Mmmm. Bed.Yay.

Hi, it’s me. Morbid. The French are sending their little submarine to the site of the Brazilian flight crash – a little guy named Porquois Pas (I mean, why not, right?) who was used to explore the remains of the Titantic, like, deep. I can’t help but wonder what they will find down there. (Stop, Bekah, Stop.) But really: blue people? Still in their seats, eyes peacefully closed, hair floating? Floating laptops and underwear? Floating peanuts and toothbrushes and chardonnay?   Is it sort of pretty and very still?  And then  all of the sudden, someone’s phone rings and they all wake up. And they open their eyes and smile and undo their seatbelts and just swim  up to safety and shake the water out of their hair. Right? Right? 

(I’m terrified.)

Okay, I’m done.

I’ve been so freaked out, as of late, about too many things. Like um, getting stabbed, plummeting planes, hitting my head, bombs, falling things, etc. What is  with me? Almost 27 years old, these things are just now freaking me out? Like I just NOW have this awareness of the random, awful things that happen daily?

I expressed my insane fear to both my Mom and Dad while home. My Dad said that after a certain point, you just have to let it go and rest on your faith. My Mom said – as we shared Chick-fila in the food court (prime target for terrorist bombing. Thanks, Dad) – everything happens for a reason. C’est vrais, ma mere!

Everything happens for a reason, indeed. There is peace in this, at least.  Natasha Richardson’s death was random and tragic – but because of it, hundreds of lives will be saved, I don’t doubt – starting with that little girl to the left.

CNN reports -

‘Connie and Donald McCracken were watching CNN one evening last week when they learned of the tragic death of actress Natasha Richardson from a head injury. Immediately, their minds turned to their 7-year-old daughter, Morgan, who was upstairs getting ready for bed.

Two days earlier, Morgan, her father, and brother had been playing baseball in the yard of their Mentor, Ohio, home when her father hit a line drive that landed just above Morgan’s left temple. A lump formed, but the McCrackens iced it down and the swelling subsided within an hour.

“For the next two days, she was perfectly fine,” Donald McCracken says. “She had no symptoms. She went to school both days and got an A on her spelling test as usual. There were no issues whatsoever.”

But after hearing about Richardson’s death, the McCrackens wondered if Morgan was really as OK as she seemed. After all, Richardson had been talking and lucid immediately after her fatal injury.

When they went upstairs to kiss Morgan good night, she complained of a headache. “Because of Natasha, we called the pediatrician immediately. And by the time I got off the phone with him, Morgan was sobbing, her head hurt so much,” McCracken says.

The McCrackens took Morgan to the emergency room at LakeWest Hospital in neighboring Willoughby, where doctors ordered a CT scan and immediately put Morgan on a helicopter to Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, with her father by her side.

“I knew it was bad when she had to get there by helicopter in six minutes, instead of the 30 minutes it would have taken to get to Cleveland in an ambulance,” McCracken said.

When the helicopter arrived at Rainbow, the McCrackens were greeted by Dr. Alan Cohen, the hospital’s chief of pediatric neurosurgery. He whisked Morgan into the operating room, pausing for a moment to tell McCracken that his daughter had the same injury as Richardson: an epidural hematoma.

McCracken remembers standing in the emergency room, feeling like the life had just been sucked out of him. “My heart sank,” he says. “It just sank.”

Unlike Richardson’s, Morgan’s story has a happy ending. After surgery and five days in the hospital, she’s at home and doing fine. “Dr. Cohen told us that if we hadn’t brought her in Thursday night, she never would have woken up,” McCracken says.’

….What average person knows to seek immediate medical attention if they hit their head, even if they seem to feel fine? It’s certainly something we don’t realize, or have forgotten. Now, we certainly won’t forget. Also – if this had happened to a non-celebrity – it wouldn’t have had nearly as large of an impact.