Laughter
When my dad drove me back on Saturday, I moved this weekend and he needed to bring down the van, I was reading a trade paperback I bought a couple of years ago called "The Golden Age". Its about this alternate reality that the superheroes that inhabited the World War II-era of DC Comics were put in. There's a line in it during a conversation between Alan Scott (The Original Green Lantern) and Jonathon Chambers (Johnny Quick) that really stuck with me. Both, in this world, had retired from their super-hero identities and were frustrated with the lack of action in their lives and the new stresses they were encountering in the "civilian" world. Johnny Quick had been a guy who, like nearly all comic book speedsters, basically laughed at life and didn't take anything seriously, that's what happens when you are literally able to run away from problems. The line, which was delivered as exposition, was "Alan looked into Johnny's eyes, and saw how much the laughter's left them." With Karen moving on in her life, which I obviously don't begrudge her, because I want her to be happy, I can't help but think how much the laughter in my eyes, the joy in my life, has gone away in the past nine months, most of which has been my own doing. I talked to Susan on Sunday, and we're trying to see each other when she comes home for Christmas, and that conversation is what got me thinking about this. I wondered whether anyone who hasn't seen me for as long as Susan has would recognize me as the same person.
I'm not the same person, which is the reason I've had such a hard time getting over what happened was not just my being upset about losing Karen, it was because I lost a part of myself as well. And that's only been compounded by my depression, the way I've shut myself off from people and from social situations during the last months. While I am not exactly the most social of people to begin with, the last few months I've been so totally cut off, so obsessed with my own grief that I've lost sight of the rest of my life, that there will be a future for me, even if it isn't with Karen.

It's time for me to get the laughter back.

I'm really disgusted by what Notre Dame did in firing Willingham. Notre Dame is supposed to stand for something, not just be a football factory. Notre Dame is supposed to value its academics, its supposed to be the place that values integrity. And in firing Willingham when they did, and for the reasons they did, they have revealed themselves to be nothing more than a football team with a University attached .