Some things that have happened this past week (in reverse order)

-We went to Five Spice, the local Indian restaurant, and made terribly insensitive approximate puns. I say approximate because all of the puns were made as if we thought they were the other kind of Indians. (”This Indian restaurant isn’t very crowded– guess we don’t need a reservation.“)

-We took pictures for our holiday card (coming soon to a mailbox near you). I don’t want to give anything away. I will say that my hair is bigger than I’ve allowed it to get since I learned how to brush it myself in the second grade.

- I went to a Hannukah party at the synagogue for my fill of latkes, at the invitation of the Greenfields. The holiday hinges on this part in the Hannukah story where the little bit of oil found in a jar in the holy temple, destroyed by the Greeks, burns in the menorah for a whole eight days. The rabbi related this miraculous use of oil to our un-miraculous present day use of oil. He encouraged the congregation to explore alternative energies and, as a Hannukah present, gave us all Publix canvas bags to discourage the use of petroleum based plastic bags. I was very impressed.

On my way back from the synagogue, I noticed how I was navigating the route back home (though not so complicated) on complete autopilot. I realized that some sense of comfort had snuck up on me– that all of a sudden, things were familiar. I was on my way back to Hub-Bub for the B.Y.O.A. event, after which I would paint until late. Maybe home really is this transient, and it is only the current place in which you have something to do.

-We went to Ginna’s house for a party. The theme was Texas Hold-em and tall boys, favorites of her friend Jason Wenger from Alaska.

-Lisa sent me a menorah and candles because I couldn’t find them in Spartanburg. I have lit the candles every night in my room by myself, singing the blessings into an empty house. It is a little lonely. One night, I took the menorah into Derya’s room and we all talked in the candlelight until they burned down. That was nice.

-My birthday happened, and death came in threes. I spent the first hours of my 23rd year in a near paralyzing state of fear and anxiety. I spent all day immersing myself in tabloid murder stories– Sean Taylor, the Redskins player from Miami who was murdered by a bunch of neighborhood kids in a botched burglary attempt, and Meredith Kercher, a British student studying abroad in Italy who was allegedly raped and then violently murdered at the hands of her American student roommate and two other Italian men.

What attracted me to these stories was the fact that in both cases, the murderers felt familiar, almost too close to home. In the case of Sean Taylor, the murderers were not really murderers per se, but a bunch of dumb high school kids who wanted to steal stuff. They didn’t expect Taylor to be home (he should have been with the Redskins, but was back in Florida nursing a knee injury), and when they saw he was, wielding a machete, they panicked and shot him in the leg. They hit an artery. He died. My brother called me. “Have you seen pictures of those kids?” he asked. “Yea.” “It’s weird,” he said, “I feel like I know them. They look like punkass kids we went to high school with.” I felt the same way. In the latter case, the murderess is an upper-class all-American blond girl from UW, 20-years-old, beautiful, and perfectly ordinary. She looks like anyone who could have been sitting behind me at a lecture at NYU.

This unnerved me. I am afraid of a lot of things. I am afraid of flying. I am afraid of the environmental apocalypse. When I express these fears to people, many say, “You could die at any time. You could die walking across the street. So why worry about it?” I suppose when someone says something like this, the hope is that the amount of things to be afraid of is so overwhelming that it’s impossible to be afraid of anything at all. After a day of oblivion in the details of two totally random murders, seemingly carried out by characters from my life, I felt the weight of all of those uncertainties at once. I felt like there was no way to get safe, ever, anywhere. I was overwhelmed by all of the things there are to be afraid of– and there are so many things to be afraid of– and that did not mitigate the fear one bit.

The day of my birthday then took on a strange tone. I was exhausted from having not slept the night before, and from living out years worth of fear in the span of a couple frenetic hours. I watched Sean Taylor’s funeral on the internet, with so many people coming up to talk about him that it was like an extended episode of “This Is Your Life.” I couldn’t help but morbidly equate all of the people speaking at Taylor’s funeral to all of the people calling to wish me a happy birthday– this was my life. (I am laughing at myself a little now. It is just like me to spend my entire birthday thinking about death.)

At dinner that night with Brian, Ginna called me to invite me to a party on Friday at her house. “Texas hold-em and tall boys,” is all she said. Rachel called me while we were getting the bill. “Did you talk to Ginna?” she asked. “Yea, she’s having a party.” “Did she tell you why?” “No.” “You’re gonna hate this,” Rachel said, as if she really didn’t want to tell me. “Her friend was shot and killed in Anchorage. She can’t go back to be with her friends, so she’s having a party for him here.” He was killed while idling in his car by a stranger, a man the same age as him who had just killed his own father with a machete and was on what the media called “a killing spree.” More random violence. More proof of total chaos, no safe place anywhere. Must make cocoon. Must make cocoon.