My interest in death began as a slightly morbid, solitary teenager. It has persisted well into my twenties, as evidenced by the contents of my bookshelves and the non-fiction sections I fnd myself wandering into. Cannibalism, poison, mythology, vampires: all good stuff. Although squeamish about the sight and particularly smell of death, I can read about maggots, bacterial decay, cellular asphyxiation, and rigor mortis with equanimity and interest. After reading Death and Sex by Tyler Volk, I have a new appreciation of how death makes room for and facilitates life. After this latest book, I can give you a fairly good summary of what will begin to happen as soon as my heart stops. I think it's pretty interesting that what we define as death is a actually series of events, some of them deaths (of cells that don't drop dead when we do), some of them new life (of bacteria that reaps the bounty of our ruptured cells). I would prefer that my death were quick, relatively painless, and lucid, but understand that I may well die, toothless and unable to remember my name, in a nursing home. So be it. I don't fear the clean click into nothingness at the end.

But the other component of death, quite distinct from its biological processes, is emotional, endured not by the dead but by the living. And that I have a much harder time dealing with, as I imagine most people do. This is where religions come in with their comforting images of rainbow bridges, reunions in eternity, the promise that what has been lost is not lost forever. They are soothing images, probably healing images. As a skeptic, it's not that I don't want to believe. It's simply that I don't. I have no greater faith in rainbow bridges than I do in pots of gold at the ends of rainbows.

Coping with loss as a permanent, unchangeable thing is its own set of little deaths. Biological death may be blowflies, lividity, putrefaction. But death, as it is experienced by the living, is losing a part of yourself that you needed as much as an eye, a hand, a leg, and limping on as an invisible amputee. Death is knowing exactly how good you had it at one point and realizing that you'll never find what you lost again. Death is the unseen, colorless hemmorhaging of tears, and the propensity to pick at wounds because they are your strongest connection now to what you lost. Death is watching all the life around you and wondering why it was so damn much to ask of the universe to keep life in the one thing that mattered most. Screw the symbiotic relationship between life and death and the flourishing bacterial flora. I needed that.

It's been a hard week.

I picked up Caroline Knapp's Appetites for $1, on a whim, at a booksale. It is nominally a memoir about one woman's experience with anorexia. I never read memoirs. I am not particularly interested in women's issues. I have never suffered from an eating disorder.

This book was an epiphany.

There have been relatively few books that I can point out as having been life changing, putting into words things I have felt and experienced but never been able express. Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses was one. Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is another. Each of these books have taught me something about myself and how I relate to the world, and then subtly altered it. It helps that Caroline Knapp is a shy, sensitive, observant, and blazingly intelligent writer.

Although Appetites is nominally about anorexia, it's really about emotional disorders that exhibit themselves in a number of ways: anorexia, alcoholism, cutting, addictions. Although I have never had an eating disorder, I instantly recognized the emotions Caroline Knapp described in fueling her anorexia. The aloofness, the pride in turning away from what others needed, the inability to reach out to others, the substitution of the disease for meaninful, functional relationships. These were paragraphs I almost could have written, perhaps did write in some form as an angsty teenager in my many journals. Instead of starving myself of food as a teenager, I starved myself of human relationships, convinced that I neither needed nor wanted them.

My mother raised me to be polite, considerate, and self-deprecating. I was taught, if only by example, never to take the last cookie, ask for seconds, or answer anything but 'yes' to the question, "Are you OK?" One of my clearest memories from preschool was a school field trip that my mother chaperoned. At some point, one kid skinned her knee or something. My mother asked her classic question. I expected her to answer as I would have. Instead, she said no and continued crying, as if she had every right to. I was deeply shocked.

As I have mentioned before, my parents weren't particularly supportive. They made it clear early on that they didn't like it when I inconvenienced them, so I simply stopped asking. In my teens, between my unwillingness to reach out to them and their unwillingness to reach out to me, I threw everything into my relationship with Naomi instead, with all the expected consequences after she died. I think I may be recovering a little from my grief and emotional dysfunction, but I'm still not what you would call healthy. I'm not even totally sure I want to be. Kevin's taken me on as his socialization project. Brave man.

Brie is coming on Sunday. I'm determined to do better this time in not cutting out the people (person?) who love me.

I have now achieved mythical friend status.

My [only] college friend Emily came down to see me yesterday, bringing with her a three-tiered homemade wedding cake for which she had cut out stencils and dusted with cocoa powder. Emily has always been one of those uber competent people who are interested in everything and know more about it than you do. Naturally she's an excellent pastry chef. Although it's no longer so pretty (Kevin and I ate the top tier last night), there's still plenty left. Come on over.

Emily and I are friends essentially because she was the one person at Santa Cruz who insisted on talking to a taciturn and unapproachable girl and kept insisting that I come over for tea. Eventually I realized that I liked her company and, somewhat to my surprise, she liked mine. We are complete opposites in many ways; scientist and writer, self-described nymphomaniac and asexual, adventurer and homebody, extrovert and misanthrope. Nonetheless, our friendship works.

As you can imagine, Emily has a huge social circle.  Occasionally she'll mention her friend Jen to them, whom no one has ever seen and may well be imaginary, like the Easter Bunny, the abominable snowman, and leprechauns. "She was at the wedding," Emily insists, but no one has any recollection of it. "She's not my imaginary friend!" But they don't quite believe her. Apparently I don't make a very realistic character. Now I am known as Emily's mythical friend Jen.

Score.  Can I get that on business cards?