Genevieve
	Waking	Sleeping	Sign	Repose	Wish
	The gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam...

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One Last Courageous Act?
2001-07-19 - 4:11 p.m.

This morning started off with the All Hands IT Staff meeting at 10am to 11:30am. yeah, just what I need. We did get to meet the new CIO, Veejay? Nice guy. Good speaker, excellent people skills, etc. Problem One was that I shouldn't have sat by Terrets-boy. bad bad bad bad bad... he'd say something to me and in a completely silent room while everyone is listening to new CIO, Gen is busy stifling laughter and trying not to pee her pants. oh dear. and hour and a half later and comments like "if so and so takes the opportunity to whine about X, you owe me a dollar" and "if this meeting goes any longer GOF won't have any of his pinky left to knaw on"... what could have been a nice short, meet the new guru meeting ended up being a meet the diff't departments meeting and oh, let's have a QanA session cause we want to prolong the torture... Hopefully, since we all got a little more restless as the meeting went on, my big gwuffawww at the beginning won't be too long remembered... I hope... sigh

Leaving in half and hour or so to go pick up Wen and head down to a lovely dinner with Gwen before the Acorn Folding Party tonight. This should be fun, and we get to hang out with Gwen. Everyone loves Gwen, just like everyone loves Gen... must be the G name... sadly this also means another late night for me, but it's not like if I had stayed home I wouldn't have gone out to Last Chance and stayed out late anyway. At least this way I am being useful, right?

The play last night was excellent! wow, riveting performance by Judith Light. Hedda Gabler is just one of the most psycho female characters to be so well written. There were of course, comments about is she related to SHe-who-shall-not-be-named?, and jokes to that effect. tee hee... Now mind you, the Victorian times were like the Golden Age of histrionics and over dramatization, so she fits in just nicely. It's your classic tale of aristocratic woman has gone through too many suitors and her money, and needs to marry soon, so she settles for someone who admires her, but that she does not love. She goes through lots of stuff manipulating folks out of sheer boredom, and ends up meeting again with an old suitor who since leaving her acquaintance has stopped drinking and running around. In one night she turns him back to his previous life of debauchery and he ends up feeling that his life is over and contemplating suicide. Of course, suicide in those times was something courageous, something dramatic and cool. When he is at his wit's end he comes to her and she does not offer any solace. Instead she gives him one of her father's duelling pistols and tells him to "Do it beautifully!" WHAT!?! OHMIGOD!!! she truly is psycho. Of course the killer, opps :), is that he doesn't "do it beautifully", instead he takes the gun runs out and while caught up in something else, it goes off in his coat pocket and he shoots himself mortally but not "beautifully" in the gut. No act of "courage", no dramatic ending, just pain and suffering and ugliness. I gotta say the play was very well done, you could easily believe in all these characters and sympathize with all of them, even Hedda to an extent. The stage backdrop, gradually moved closer to show how she felt locked in a cage in her own home...

Now, I feel the need to address something. One of my last years of high school, the elite theater company, comprised of all of the best theater students from the county, like 7 different schools, put on an ensemble play adapted from the songs of Les Mis dealing with teenage suicide. Persistent Whispers. I wish I could find a copy of that transcript, or a video taping of it. powerful stuff. So powerful they had counselors waiting in the wings to help folks deal with the ugly reality. I also had to deal with following an abulance to the hospital with one of my best friends to get her stomach pumped after she tried to take her own life. I knew many friends who contemplated suicide and a few folks who took those final drastic steps. Suicide is not pretty, dramatic, or couragous. It is actually about the most cowardice thing a human could do. It may releave you of your pain, but the pain that continues in your friends and family is irrepairable. It is not just cowardice, but selfish, with the pain you leave behind. Those few folks who took their own lives that I know of are not trumpetted as heros, but rather called selfish cowards, most likely pitied, and often too soon forgotten. I'm not saying that thoughts of suicide aren't normal, because they are. I doubt there is a single person who has not thought that it would be easier to end it than to go on. But, killing yourself is never a solution, never worth it, and it can always get better. It always does get better, trust me. Not that I am concerned that anyone who reads this is close to taking their own life, but you just never know. If anyone is, know that it is not worth it, and you don't want to be buried and pitied, you want to live and become stronger because you've survived. The pain otherwise left behind is sometimes unbearable.

I had more to say, but I think I need to end it there...

There's a grief that can't be spoken
there's a pain goes on and on...

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