Wow. This is the first time I've been able to sign into my account in weeks! Blame a ridiculously horrific wireless connection or blame the weather (everyone seems to be doing that these days)...

First thing's first then--Happy New Year!

I'm back home. Finally able to relax a little and stop dwelling on the bad. What was the key? Getting back in the gym. But, I'm still on this psycho sleep schedule. Vampire LYDLT. That's me.

I'm still waiting for one of my grades to come through, and it's amazing how obsessive a person can be...a lot hinges on this one grade...hopefully it all works out.

Probably the most significant thing I did this break, well, let's say the one thing that has been haunting me all break is the wonderful movie I saw right at the beginning--Brokeback Mountain.

I have an immense urge to post bits and pieces of the New York Times review on the movie...my favorite parts of it...but, then I know some people didn't see it yet, so I don't want to ruin it for them. Please please skip ahead if you didn't see the movie.

Excerpt:

"THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.

...

Yet "Brokeback Mountain" is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.

Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."

One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life."

Honestly, all I can say, is that the movie won't leave my head alone. It's my favorite movie of all time...but I won't elaborate on the why of it all for those who haven't yet seen it. Suffice it to say that Ang Lee is a genius who has taken a short story and made it into an epic.

***

A lot of things have been going on for me in these short weeks back home. Still dealing with the former best friend issues...no resolution there. It's even more maddening when I am back home, only a block away...I'll explain more in future posts (hopefully the wireless holds up).

***

My dad took two weeks off leading up to New Years...two weeks off to relax and enjoy himself, to perhaps go on a family trip with me and my sister, or at least me. Two weeks to have fun...and he ended up cleaning the house, moving around furniture and doing errands. Monday night, his last day of vacation, he looked around the table at my aunt and uncle, and me...and he just stared ahead..."Two weeks have gone by..." and his voice trailed off.

And I wanted to cry.

He came into my room yesterday and saw me sleeping on the basic mattress cover. Why hadn't I put on the new sheets, he asked me. He'd washed them all in anticipation of my arrival back home, just like he'd taken the days off in hopes that we could all do something together. I hadn't put the sheets back on because I was too lazy...what little effort.

How selfish we can be sometimes.

Two nights ago my dad and I went out to the movies. Narnia was sold out, and though my dad wanted to see King Kong, I wasn't up for it. We went home. That was perhaps the third movie my dad would have seen in theaters this past year. He saw Harry Potter alone, Munich with me...and he really wanted to see King Kong.

He buys these movie tickets from his work so that we can see them somewhat cheaper in theaters. In the end, he ends up financing mine or my sister's outtings to movies more than his own.

I should have gone in to see King Kong. I mean, I was a little tired. But my dad went home and to sleep--disappointed, sad.

How selfish we can be sometimes.

I have come to admire my father so much in this past year and a half. They say you see the true measure of people when they face adversity, when they are really pushed and tested...and they continue to fight and stick to their morals.

In his place, I don't know if I'd be as strong, if I'd be able to continue.

I fear sometimes that the only reason he does so is for my sister and I.

I hate thinking that because it scares me. It's too much pressure.

This week my aunt's brother died. She hadn't seen him for more than 20 years. He died alone in Tehran, Iran, without family around him. Alone. Isn't that what people fear the most?

She cried. My dad says it's important to be with people when someone close to them dies because not only are they sad, but they are also afraid.

My dad went and stayed with her, and comforted her and my uncle. It was so strange seeing him there, sitting with her and talking to her. What an odd pair, the two of them. Hurt in so many different ways. Where did he get the energy to comfort her?

If I were to ask for anything in this coming year...if I were to hope for anything. It would be the assurance that everything would be okay for him. That he would find true happiness on his own in his own self. That everything would be resolved and simply melt away...those tragic histories of the past ending in a beautiful crescent half-arc of a rainbow.

Life does not deal fairly with everyone. But I wonder what makes some people so lucky and others so damn unfortunate. My dad deserves better.