We now return you to our irregularly scheduled programme.

For those of you that knew of it, the computer problem has been fixed. I've got a fresh start. It seems my Mac was just sick of me. It'll take a while to import all my old bookmarks and away tags and stuff, if I can even do that. The programs won't start. But they're starting over here now.

For those of you who were blessed with ignorance in this time of strife, be very very merry.

So my aunt's all dead-like and I'm mostly ambivalent about it. She's part of this whole... family (insert sneer of repugnance) thing... through marriage to our uncle Greg, my mum's brother. He came home Wednesday to find she had died while he was out doing some errands. She had been briefly ill before. The autopsy indicates only an intestinal blockage. What is rather uncommon about the pair of them is that they are/were both in wheelchairs; uncle has lived with cerebral palsy all his life and Donna, his wife, was born with spina bifida. They met on the internet. Of all these relative-type things on mum's side of the family, Greg is the only one I really feel anything more than irritation toward. He's an artist and creative thinker, and our personalities are rather similar. We like to laugh when something is bothering us. It was something I think Donna never really understood about him. She always had a very condescending and almost snide demeanour about her, though it may simply have been confusion as to why I'd rather talk to her husband than her. I'm not being very nice, but hey; I'm agreeing with Orson Scott Card and his whole Speaker for the Dead idea. Don't gloss over a person's life so that their flaws are buried beneath a superficial sheen of piety and false ebullience. If they were an asshole, everyone knows it, and they don't honestly enjoy hearing otherwise. If they were unhappy, why go on about how they were snatched from their happy happy happy life by cruel fate and the malignant personifiaction of death?

Anyway, I'll be out of town from Friday to... who knows when... for calling hours and funeral and being forced to hug people and pretend I actually care about them when we share nothing other than a handful of genes and they have no part in my life. Why the is hugging required anyway? I should tell them all I have a terminal disease or the stomach flu, or maybe Ebola Sudan... I'll survive my grievous illness, of course, and have to invent another one for the next get-together. This is actually one of the times I'm delighted about my mother's conversion to Judaism: according to the strict laws of Hassidim (the very formal Kabbalistic branch of Judaism), she cannot enter the church or be present for the funeral Mass. I'm not sure she's even allowed in the funeral home for the wake. Under pretense of keeping her company or, that not being enough to suffice, my own spontaneous decision to convert to Judaism, I intend to avoid as much of the grieving as possible.

Funerals are for the living. I've always believed that and have been confused by people's need to hang on to life. I'm not saying that in the same situation I would not be saddened, desperate, and upset if my loved one(s) died, but I've come to accept, in my own sort of patchwork belief system, that death is not a bad thing. As people say to comfort themselves (or in attempts to comfort another), "They're in a better place". Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. I think the death of the body is something largely misunderstood. I'm not sure any philosophy or religion has it "right", or if there even is a right or wrong about it which can be garnered. Was it Douglas Adams who said something to the effect of "If ever anyone understood the meaning of the universe/life it would immediately cease to exist and be replaced by something even more baffling"? I know I'm misquoting, but I'll look it up later.