carla

The landlady's mother lives on the top floor of the house in which I rent out one of the rooms.

Last night, I saw my roommate in the bathroom and managed to ask him if the internet to our house had been fixed. Apparently, a few weeks ago, AT&T "accidentally" turned off or disconnected the internet to the house. Fortunately, the landlady looked into the issue and offered to take off $25 from our rent for next month.

Once I asked him, he told me that the password to the new internet service was located upstairs next to Carla's TV. Then, he added in the fact that Carla had passed away Tuesday.

Tuesday?! That would make it 2 days ago that she had died, and I had no idea. All these thoughts ran into my head. "Was her body dead on the top floor?" "Should I have checked if she was okay?" "She has 2 cats- what's to become of them now?"

I remember seeing her last week, or even the day before Tuesday, and she seemed fine except for the graying hair and loss of color. How old was she?

The children came bay last night to have dinner in the house. They also brought large tupperware to pack up all of her belongings. So strange. If anything, I would have bet that my old Japanese roommate Yama would have kicked the bucket while I was living with him. Not Carla. I wonder if she died peacefully in her sleep, or if she were at the hospital when it happened.

Why does it always take death to put things in perspective? It has been over a week since I last talked to the MSTP students in the lab. All over something so trivial. My postdoc told me that I was being too subtle, and that they are just too oblivious to recognize the lesson that I was trying to teach them.

I came into work today, and he was there already, boiling toes or tails for genotyping, yet I just walked past him and continued to sit down at my desk to turn on my computer. Yesterday at lunch, both of them tried to talk to me when people were around, asking about the Shamrock Shake I was drinking at McDonald's. Now I'm wondering if (1) they actually want to talk to me, and the ball is in my court, or (2) whether they were just trying to be pretentious and let everybody seem that things are fine between us, and choose to not talk to me one on one. Is it still them that don't want to talk to me, or am I the one who needs to initiate conversation to make things right again?

I tell myself that I will be ready to talk to them about the situation once I'm done with preparing for lab meeting and taking an exam, but maybe it's all just an excuse to not want to talk to them. I REALLY enjoy the silence in my bay, but it's unnatural and wrong to squash their personalities over my needs.