Aftermath

It's been 3.5 weeks since Joel moved away and Keiko and I broke up.

Both these things have caused significant changes to day-to-day life. In the last few weeks I've been trying to make the adjustments.

On the Joel front:

- I have come to realize that fully 90% of the edible things in this house got here through Joel. After throwing out all the things in the fridge that were in various states of decomposition, which took quite some time, and then throwing out all the things I would never in a million years eat myself (e.g., fake chicken nuggets- Joel is a vegetarian that hates fruit, while I am a carnivore that hates vegetables and loves fruit. Between the 2 of us, as Joel once observed, there is no food that one of us won't refuse to eat), the entire contents of the refrigerator, not including condiments, were:

a few eggs
a small chunk of cheddar cheese
some prosciutto
2 apples
some fresh oregano (teetering on the edge of decomposition, but I rounded up. Probably more accurate to label it "some not-particularly-fresh oregano")

- on a related note, Joel and I were roughly comparable in terms of our willingness to allow things to slowly decompose in the fridge.

- the house is less lively without Kona bolting around it. She and I liked each other, although we were not madly in love the way she and Joel are. Through patient tutoring, we learned such commands as:

"Move it!"

"Do NOT go out that door!"

and

"PLEASE hurry up and poop already!"

We also worked hard at, but experienced much more limited success with:

"OK, look, you are NOT going to stop and sniff EVERY goddamned planter in the city of Palo Alto."

- On the plus side, I've slowly begun to turn back the tide of Kona hair that threatened at times to engulf the house. Kona is nature's perfect machine for converting air into hair. "But wait," you say, "isn't it *food* that she turns into hair?" No, no, Kona tuns food into a super-sticky substance that enables her hair to resist the washer, the dryer, and the vacuum cleaner (which she always had a particular hatred for).

So far, the way I'm winning the war is with the one thing stronger than Kona-hair: tape. I take pieces of tape and stick them to the chairs/sofa/etc. and then remove them. Basically, I'm giving my entire house a full Brazilian.

- I've always preferred having a roommate to living alone. It's more interesting, and keeps you in the habit of making little compromises. When you live alone, you never compromise on anything, which is not good practice for eventually being with someone.

I have had a lot of roommates over the years, ranging from the unmitigated disaster (Alana), to the eventual-best-friend-for-life (Laszlo), and everything in between. I got the beach house assuming I would never have a roommate, only because at this age I think I've passed the point where I can mentally tolerate the idea of posting an ad on Craigslist and having some random person move in. So it was a surprise to end up with Joel as a roommate, and he was a very good one. Considerate, and always good company, even in those moments when he was grumpy. And given that Joel is a 90-year-old man trapped in a 35-year-old body, that was a non-trivial number of moments.


On the Keiko front:

It's weird when you suddenly go from having someone you can tell anything to, no matter how mundane, to not having that person. And then longer that person is around before they aren't anymore, the harder is the adjustment. It gives a tiny, tiny glimpse into why when one half of an elderly couple dies, the other so often follows soon after. There's something incredibly powerful about having a constant companion.

Technology only amplifies the effect, it seems to me. Keiko and I had a gchat window open basically all day every day, and so any time something jumped into either's head, we would tell the other. Again, the sudden shift to not having that is incredibly dislocating.

For the most part, I've just buried myself in work. My GMAT student flew in from TX, and we had a week of hardcore all-day prep. I was wiped out at the end of every day. And last week Kiddo was here for a week of hardcore all-day math camp. More on that shortly. Being so busy has helped keep the amount of day-to-day sadness manageable.

Odds and ends:

Kiddo was my original student. We are entering our 7th consecutive year of tutoring together. I started with her when she was in 8th grade, and now she's starting her sophomore year at Stanford.

Over the years, she's become like my little sister. Keiko and I attended her graduation, and I stopped charging her family years ago. I help her because she's Kiddo, and I want to see her do well.

So, this year Kiddo is going to be taking multivariate calculus, and econometrics, which is a stats-intensive class. After last year's challenges finding a regular time that she would show up for lessons, I suggested that she come out a week early and do hardcore math camp all day. I'd backfill some of the stuff she only barely got in single variable calculus, plus teach her the stats stuff ahead of the class. She always has done better when she learned something first from me.

But it turns out Stanford doesn't let you move into the dorms early unless you want to pay a million dollars a day, and when she said she wanted to do the math camp but had no place to stay, I said that PROVIDED she got 150% approval from her parents, she could stay at the house. After all, there are empty bedrooms, and she's my other little sister.

Her parents approved, and so, for a little over a week, I suddenly had a teenage daughter. And let me tell you, having a teenager is a pain in the ass. You have to get them out of bed in the morning, because they sure as hell will not do it on their own, possibly making you late to work, and you would think that by the age of 19 they will have acquired minimal skills like ensuring that they've eaten something. But that turns out to be a naive hope.

Last Sunday, Kiddo had a particularly hard time getting out of bed, and I wound up late to the SF office for my first lesson. I was bailed out by the fact that that student is also chronically late, but I was annoyed. I put Kiddo out in the kitchen with some precalculus problems to work on while I did the lesson, and then gave an interview to a prospective tutor. When I came out of the interview, I looked around. No Kiddo.

I checked my phone, and there were several missed calls from her. So I called back, and she picked up and said the following:

"GusI'msosorrythepainwassobadtheparamedicsarehereI'matthe
conveniencestorearoundthecornerIneedyoutoPLEASEcome!"

(click)

oh god.

So I ran downstairs and around the corner, and sure enough, the paramedics were loading her into an ambulance. So I ran up and explained who I was, and they told me to get in. And off we went to St. Francis hospital. On the way, I had to text my student and tell him not to come down to take his last practice test before the real exam. Very, very professional. Sigh.

So we get to the emergency room, and they take her in. Eventually I join her in the room and along with the ER physician, finally hear the story:

Apparently, her period started about an hour before. She started experiencing cramps, so she went down to the convenience store to get some advil. While there, the cramps suddenly became the worst she's ever experienced in her life, and she basically passed out in the store, causing the convenience store dude to freak out and call 9-1-1.

What follows is a litany of questions from the ER physician, which went something like this:

Are you pregnant? Where is the pain located? Are you pregnant? What is the pain on a scale of 1-10? Are you sexually active? No? Well, do you think you might be pregnant? Are you on any kind of medication? Should we do a pregnancy test?

And after that was an extended discussion of teenage girl menstruation, which I am of course not going to reproduce here, principally because this is my written memory and I'd like to forget everything I had to hear about what teenage girls go through biologically. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, women are complicated.

After the doctor left, Kiddo looked at me and said: "I'm sorry you had to hear all that. But thank you for being here. I just don't understand why he was so obsessed with whether I'm pregnant. How much clearer could I be that there is _no_ _possible_ _way_ I am pregnant??"

To which I said:

"Uh, look, Kiddo, think about where we are, and what these people must see all the time. Here you are, rushed in here with symptoms very much consistent with recently becoming pregnant. And you're rushed in here, 19 years old, accompanied by a 37-year-old "family friend" who can't tell them your social security number or your address, other than "it's that building at 14th and Avenue A." 9 times out of 10, this situation is EXACTLY what they think it is. This just happens to be the one time where the situation is exactly what WE say it is. But they don't believe that, and they're probably right not to."

Kiddo: "O-o-o-o-o-o-o-h."

So, after an IV, oxygen, and some pain medication, Kiddo was discharged, and we went to get some food (I hadn't eaten since the day before, and she hadn't eaten since the drive into the office). By the time we got back to the office, she was feeling a little better, so she did more math while I got the rest of what I needed done. My student couldn't come down to the office anymore, so we eventually went home.

Her mom thanked me for being there at the hospital with her. I told her I was just glad she was OK. I've never actually killed a student, though I've been tempted on occasion, and I certainly didn't want her to be the first.

A couple days later, Stanford re-opened for the year, and I drove her down to school, along with her giant suitcases full of "books" and "shoes". I had no idea that lead shoes were in this year, but I can infer that based on the total weight of her suitcases.

And with that, my brief time as the guardian of a teenage girl ended. It was actually nice to be busy, and to have the company at the house, but it really underscored how woefully ill-prepared I am to be taking care of anybody. But I'm hopeful Kiddo got a little more self-sufficient from her time staying at the beach house, if for no other reason than she would have starved to death otherwise...