I'm ready to give up, actually.

My grandmother lives in California with my great-grandmother, grandfather, and uncle. She is addicting to sleeping pills. In fact, she is addicted to pills in general. She will literally take any pills she can find just to take them. She takes money from everyone else so that she can buy pills. She suffers from dementia. She can't talk anymore.

Now she's missing.

She's been missing for a day. She disappeared when my uncle--carelessly, I guess--took her grocery shopping. No hospital has found her, the police have no clue, and nobody anywhere seems to know where she is. My uncle drove around all night looking for her. He's still looking now. "Someone probably took her in," the policeman said. If that was true, why didn't they call the police? Now she's lost somewhere in Garden Grove, California.

I don't really know how I'm supposed to feel about it. I didn't know her very well, honestly. She bought me my first Batman action figure. I still have it. I remember her car. Her hats. We still have her dog. I remember her being happy to see us. The last time I saw her, she didn't remember me. She didn't remember anything.

Actually, I'm not sure about that part because she didn't say anything.

These last few years she has been a burden to her family. Her drug problems. Her refusal to get help. Her cancer. Her dementia. Her refusal to let her family help her. She has had a crazy, ridiculous life. And now she's lost. She was my grandmother.

Comments

Pseudo-science (like psych).

I consider myself a man of science. I try to approach problems and deal with them logically, using observations previously recorded to handle new problems. So of course my interest was piqued when someone I knew posited that men are needier and more complicated than women. An interesting theory. But to properly examine it, one must understand the concept of sexual selection and its two aspects: male competition and female choice. Which brings us to point one: men are needier [in relationships] than women. This is true. In a natural/primal setting, the males are generally love-'em-leave-'em kinds of guys. Their main objective is to reproduce as much as they can. Humans, in their infinite wisdom, have decreased the emphasis on this to the point where it has become a footnote in male purpose. Civilization dictates that, instead of finding a partner for the sole purpose of reproduction, males find females for life companionship. With the effective removal of their natur...

I'm a geologist, not an alcoholic.

I thought I had seen people drink before. Hell, I thought that I had drank before. But, clearly, I thought wrong on both of those counts. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a reason to justify all of the drinking that transpired down there last week. There was no rhyme or reason to it, it just was. Field work just makes a man thirsty. Taking this class was easily one of the best things I've ever done. We worked hard every day out in the field. Wake up at 7, leave the beach house by 8, hit the water by 9. My first three field days were in service on the R/V Acadiana , a 58 foot vessel that towed the CHIRP fish , the air gun, and the streamer to measure all the seismic data--looking at the subsurface of the seafloor we drove over. My second ship was the R/V Itasca using the multibeam , sidescan , and grab sampler --getting seafloor surface bathymetry. They were long, exhausting days and we returned to the docks around 6 or 7 every evening. And then, drinking. So much ...

No, Holmes, no!

All I ever think about these days is how much I have to/want to study. I hope that's not how I have a good time, now. Would I rather go hang out with peeps or would I rather sit in and study? It is a difficult question to answer. Just a couple more days and then I can focus all my energy on the next greatest idea I've ever had: iconic detectives and sharks.

everything is fine

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