A Tale of Two Unilever Brands

Well hello again! I know I haven't been writing much -- I don't have a good excuse, and I won't subject you to any of the bad ones. I did want to pop by here and say a few words about an event that took place last weekend, and all of the thoughts and feelings it aroused in me. On Saturday, one of my best friends from college, Hannah, got married to a great, weird, goofy, wonderful man named Pat. Obviously this was a big day for Hannah, but since this is my blog and I'm an incredibly egotistical person, I'm going to make it about me. One of the things I think is nice about weddings (and is one of the reasons it sort of upsets me that I probably won't have one of my own) is that it's one of two occasions on which people get to say all kinds of nice things about the bride and groom (or bride and bride, or groom and groom), and unlike the other one, they're alive to hear all the nice things. Moreover, considering Hannah will probably outlive me anyway, I figured this was my one opportunity to express to her how important she's been to me. As you may have been able to guess, I did not do a very good job. To be fair, though, it would have been nearly impossible to do as good a job as I would have wanted to do. It's hard for me to express in a pithy way the impact my friends from college, and Hannah in particular, had on me, especially because their impact came from hours and hours and hours of shared experience -- studying, talking, running through the halls with a dead fish on a spoon... How do you sum up all those experiences in a two minute speech? And even if you could, does that really capture what that person means to you?


I decided to go in a different direction for my speech, though, because there was one moment I kept coming back to when I was thinking about Hannah. As you may or may not have been able to gather in reading between the lines of this blog, or, more likely, in talking to me at all last year, moving to Fargo was probably one of the most, if not the most, difficult things I've ever done. And yeah, part of that was culture shock and the bedazzled NRA t-shirts at Wal-Mart and not knowing a single person in the city I was moving to, and part of it was missing going to talks at Busboys and Poets and Nats games and playing kickball on the National Mall. But mostly it was surrendering a vision of myself and my future, letting go of, I don't want to say illusions, but some conception of what my life was. It was like ripping off the biggest, stickiest Band-Aid in the world, which was still covering up a cut that hadn't fully healed. I needed to do it, and I'm glad every day that I did, but even thinking about my last weekend in DC makes me a little anxious. And on my second to last night in my favorite city in the world, after I had said goodbye to some of my favorite people in the world, I was terrified and miserable, and basically a complete mess. I don't get like this very often, basically having a kind of emotional emergency, and I knew I needed to put myself in someone else's hands. So I called Hannah. Now, I don't talk to Hannah very often anymore -- we call each other maybe once every six months or so, and it's always easy to talk to her, but it's not like I know what's going on with her day-to-day. But there was no one else it made the remotest sense to me to call. I don't remember what Hannah said, but whatever it was, it calmed me down enough to basically be able to get on with my life, at least right then. So Hannah, if I do outlive you, that's probably what I'll say at your funeral. Plus probably a few of the old chestnuts ("One is tends to ponder obsessively death").

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Anyway, back to me. I think you've all probably read enough of my Deep Thoughts for now, but hopefully I'll have a more general update about my life in the next few days. I have some hypotheticals to share with you, plus a lot of insecurities to trot out again, so look forward to that!