I had a dream where my younger brother casually appeared, and I told him “y’know, your wife and I thought you were dead. Does she know you’re not?” “Wait, you two BELIEVED I was DEAD? How’d that happen?” "I dunno, maybe touching your corpse, being left on my own to speak a language I don’t know with your in-laws, doing some bones-in-urns-with-chopsticks ceremony after you got cremated?"
There’s more to the dream, but it got gruesome and horrific and as a result I no longer have high-glycemic fruits after dinner.
My fiancee’s dog just died, on her father’s birthday, and her parents were taking care of the dogs. And I can’t give her a hug because the Atlantic Ocean is in the way.
I just called the IVF clinic to tell them we won’t be using the embryo they have stored for us. It was a really difficult call. I know we’ve made the right decision, another child wouldn’t be good for me, physically, mentally and emotionally. Even if we did decide to try, I know I never want to go through any from of IVF or embryo transfer again.
Yet I am still crying over a embryo.
Yes, it’s silly, but I think still understandable.
I guess you just have to grieve. Even if there was never really much of a life.
There’s nothing silly about it. In a way it is very like a miscarriage, which is a very emotionally painful experience for most people. You don’t have to believe anything doctrinaire about personhood, but you’re saying goodbye to a tiny bit of life that came from you, and you’re simultaneously saying goodbye to a whole world of possibilities that can’t happen.
Even knowing that it’s the right decision for you, how could it not be painful? Allow yourself to grieve as you are doing.
(And thank you for trusting in us and sharing your grief with us.)
I want all the bad news, because today is already so fucked.
My car mechanic called, and I have a head gasket issue. It would cost $800-$1000 to fix. The car is (with a fixed head gasket) not worth it. I cannot afford to make payments on another car, period. I have two internships that pay exactly diddly (wouldn’tcha know it, my funding for one of them fell through), and no paying job.
I strictly speaking don’t need a car in town. Have bicycle, will travel. HOWEVER… if I get the paying internship I really want (and which could do great things for my career) I’ll have to commute to another city daily. Otherwise, I guess I can’t take it. But all of that is counting rotten eggs that haven’t at all hatched.
Meanwhile, I have a giant fucking sword of Damocles above my head in another matter that I’m waiting to see a lawyer to resolve, and I have several balls in the air that I’m waiting to hear back on that can go either really well or really badly. While the start of this semester has gone relatively well (it always starts slow) I’m taking classes traditionally considered some of the hardest among my degree requirements, and based on this melange of shit, I’m expecting things will not go swimmingly.
According to my grungy hippie cheapskate auto mechanic (everybody needs one of those!) a leaking head gasket is not always crucial to fix right away; it depends just how bad the leak is. It’s not good, but if your car isn’t worth that much, you may be able to just continue to drive it as is until it keels over. It means you’ve got to keep track of the oil level and keep feeding it extra oil, but that might be the simplest thing to do, and if it’s already on its last legs it may not matter that the rate of engine wear is accelerated.
Disclaimer: I suck at maintaining cars, though I am still managing to keep a 14 year old Corolla limping along, barely.
Good luck on all the other stuff. That whole unpaid internship thing is so bogus! I can’t believe this has become an academic/professional expectation.
Mine described my car as “see, this car is like an 85 year old guy with clogged arteries - it might keep going for years, or it could keel over any day.”
Or as another meme has it, “Exposure is what you can die of.”
Am there right now with my 1998 Toyota RAV4L with 182,300 miles on it.
We did a little experiment on the pickup truck. We got a bottle of Steel Seal (which was something like $70 some years ago… I see the price has gone up).
We followed the directions on Steel Seal, exactly. We were able to get a few more hundred miles out of the truck once it was clear that deploying the sealant was pretty much our only option if we wanted to keep it running.
There’s Bar’s Leaks, Blue Devil, CRC, K-Seal, they are all touted as head gasket sealers. Ask around or do the meta-research. We only had one vehicle to experiment on with such an unknown.
So far with our Toyota, I’m adding antifreeze once a day, topping it off and trying hard not to idle in traffic in the hottest part of the day. It’s not ideal. Keep an eye on your engine temperature gauge when your driving. Keep a case of oil, a full jug of pre-mixed coolant, maybe a fire extinguisher handy in the car. But you knew all this.
Breathe.
Try not to think about how bad it’s going to be, if you can.
If you are willing, in the mood to experiment, consider that it’s possible things could go better than you expect.
You’re almost done with your degree. The end is in sight.
Do you have any allies? Friends? People in your network who may be able to help out?
Sometimes, people go out of town for a while and you can borrow their cars (after you set up the insurance coverages with your own insurance underwriter–it’s a big deal to get it right).
Installing Drupal 7 makes installing mediawiki look like a walk in a park. It better have taken care of its own caching set up or I’m going to go to their headquarters and replace their most valued developer with a screaming child who wakes up at 5AM every morning.
