[Open up your window to the world if you want the world to bring you happiness and pain]

My uncle’s memorial service went well, as well as a memorial service can go, I suppose. I wonder what he would have thought of all the scripture talk, about how we don’t deserve God’s forgiveness, yet we can’t be separated from God, whatever that means. Christian rituals seem creepy to me, like the inane ramblings of a crazy person, what with the talk of drinking blood and eating the body of Christ. I don’t care if it is just symbolic; it’s a little weird.

I realized that I have totally neglected to keep up with one of my closest childhood allies — my cousin Ashley. I don’t know what happened when we hit puberty, but suddenly we were too old and cool for those giggly sleepovers where we’d sit up all night eating Little Ceasar’s extra cheese pizza and watching movies rented from Blockbuster. The next day we’d go to the local waterpark until our shoulders were crispy and I would have to take cold showers for a week. We played this ridiculous game where we would sit on opposite ends of the hall in her house and place one of those balls filled with jelly between us, and hurl a dodge ball at it to try and coax it toward the other person. We pantomimed Vanilla Ice songs in my aunt’s bedroom, and made scavenger hunts for each other in the house.

God, those are some of my best memories. But we somehow fell out of touch around the time I was in mid-high school and she was heading off to college. And since then, we’ve really only seen each other at funerals and the occasional holiday.

Now, she has a degree from UTK in biomedicalnuclear engineering or something ridiculously impressive, but she’s a personal trainer in Knoxville because she loves fitness training so much and has a great gig at a center there. She’s dating a guy named Frank, whom I’ve never met, and I can’t tell you too terribly much about her beyond that, because I’m a horrible cousin. Like long lost pals, we exchanged e-mail addresses today, and I really hope we follow through and get reacquainted. I’ve missed her and I didn’t really realize it.

My dad and I had several heated discussions today. He’s a bigot and I suppose I can’t change that, but it hurts me to see him get older and more and more bitter and hateful toward everybody: Blacks, Indians, Mexicans, gay men/lesbians, women, etc. He keeps telling me that life will teach me to hate just like him, but I politely remind him that I can only hate if I volunteer to. Which I won’t, because hating is a silly waste of time, and, among thousands of other reasons, I don’t want to die a miserable, bitter old woman who thinks the whole world is out to get her.