my throat infection is eating its way to freedom

My boss is out of the office for a couple of days so i've had to learn my old work avoidance habits. it seems strange that i feel so much more guilty about wasting time here than at my job that paid me twice as much money. i guess it makes sense, since i'm working for better people, but i can't say my job is any more interesting. it consists mostly of data entry, web maintenance, and filing. soo much filing. all of which would be fine at a living wage, but at six dollars an hour, it means i also have to waitress to support myself, so i end up working six or seven days a week, which is really exhausting. All i have to say is this better look really fucking awesome on my resume.

but waitressing has been nice. i'm working at the colorado kitchen, which is a great little restaurant in the brightwood park neighborhood in nw dc. Hannah works there, and got me the job, and it's totally quirky and great. the food is awesome, the clientel (for brunch at least) are a mix of church ladies, gay men, and hipsters, and the whole thing has a laid back feel. plus i seem to be doing an ok job, except for accidentily dipping my breasts in a plate of chocolate glazed doughtnuts i was serving to a table of disabled iraq war veterans. on the upside, i did get to eat said donuts after trying to clean the chocolate off of my shirt, and explaining to the cooks why i needed some replacement doughnuts.

i went back to cleveland last weekend to visit my mom. the visit was nice, if really strange. it's the first time i stayed with her since she moved into a new apartment, which left me feeling a little off balance. it's like the minute i get back to cleveland, i start feeling overwhelmingly sentimental, and non specificly nostalgic. i ran into my friend peter, who's graduating from art school, and i was just floored by this sensation of how much time had passed since we had known each other well. it's not like he's drastically different, it's just this sudden realization that we used to be best friends, and i knew him really intimately, but that was five years ago. who knows who we are now?

all of my Cleveland Institute of Art friends were back for graduation, so it was cool to see them. I ran into Frank at a party, and we ended up talking for like a half an hour at 3am about death and growing up and Andrew. When i went home, there was a picture on my mom's refrigerator that i had never seen before. It was an arty, vaguely homo erotic black and white photo of a man's torso with his head cropped out. i couldn't figure out why she would have it stuck to the fridge, until i realized that it was a photo of andrew. not only that, but i can be pretty sure that it was taken while we were dating, because he was wearing a necklace and bracelet in the picture that he wore all of the time then. his mom must have sent it to my mom--they've been writing. Somehow seeing a picture of him that i had never seen before, and so unexpectedly, really shook me up. i couldn't ask her to move it or take it down without raising a whole bunch of weired issues. i never talk to her about his death. i know it hurt her a lot too, they were close, but i feel like i'm only capable of dealing with my own pain around his death, and thinking about hers is too hard. i still can't believe how much this affects me almost 9 months later.

i made an appointment to get a tattoo next week. i'm going to get a human heart tattood between my shoulder blades, as a way of remembering him. i'm hoping that the experience will be cathartic.

the other thing that happened when i went home is that i finally saw a doctor that wasn't my father. they tested me for strep and mono, and all the tests are back negative, which would be great, if i wasn't feeling like shit, and you couldn't actually see the lymph nodes sticking out of the right side of my neck. so i'm back to square one, and my mom and i are out several hundred dollars. i have to get health insurance before i die.

uggg
rachel