Cory

So...as everyone knows, I had a bad week. My friend Cory died, which is indescribably tragic in a thousand ways, but particularly because he was one of the actually nicest people I knew. Not faux-nice-to-your-face, make-fun-of-how-weird-you-are-behind-your-back nice, but the kind of niceness (combined with the acid bitchiness that only gay guys can pull off) that made you wriggle like a puppy.

But now he's dead at 45, which is also not fair because he's much, much too handsome to die. He moisturizes, for God's sake! People who moisturize should at least get to live long enough to see the fruits of their labors pan out in the form of glowing skin in their declining years.

I could have made you a list of people I wish would have turn up dead on a Saturday morning with no warning, and he never, ever would have been on it.
Another way it's not fair is that I've gone from being 1/3 of the gay people at my work to being 1/2. The pressure just increased by 50%. I will not, however, succumb to the impulse to be nicer. I'll stay strong. For Cory. He'd want me to be a bitch, I know it.

Traci and I had an ungodly number of instrumentation woes last night, and she attributed them to the Ghost of Cory Past using that time to show his love and solidarity for us by fucking up everything we touched. WTF?? Whither Thou Fuckest?? Why would our Cory, he of the tidy pressed Dockers and stick-on henna tattoo of his dog, reapplied semi-weekly...why would that Cory fuck around with our beloved Coulter 750 hematology analyzer in the middle of a shift change?

Cory would sooner eat his daily banana before 11:30 than mess with the analyzer...even posthumously. He was not one to wantonly do anything irresponsible or different. There's a reason God made lunch happen at 11:30: so we'd know when to eat our banana. Duh. Life is meant to be lived neatly, and that includes good analyzer maintenance.

I listened politely to her theory before dunking her in the decorative fountain in front of the hospital. Take that, tool of Satan! Blaspheme no more, Witch!

She survived, so I think that made her a witch. Or maybe not. I get confused about this part. Where is the part where exonerated witches get to go home and resume their backbreaking 20 hours of domestic labor a day? Maybe drowning is the reward for righteousness.

So the real story is that I'm indescribably sad. I try not to cry more than once an hour when I sit in his chair, doing diffs and look up at his stuff and remember that he's not coming back. Cory liked me to tell him stories, so I've been consoling myself by telling myself stories that he would have laughed at. But I still cry.

I hate being a grown-up sometimes.