It's all relative

Here I was feeling a little depressed and bummed out. I thought I'd have a good chance this time at an NSERC USRA (Undergraduate Summer Research Award). Turns out I didn't. Despite my awards, despite the drastic improvement of my marks, and despite my research experience, it didn't mean jack-all.

I emailed Katherine asking if she'd be up for some quality time (since I'd missed her the last time we tried to meet up and I'm somewhat overdrawn on my sympathy account with some of my other friends, given this funk I've descended into), and then I got this several minutes later.

Hey Justin,

My friend Irene Arevalo passed away last Sunday evening and her
memorial is going to be this Saturday in London, ON. She was
struggling with cancer for many years... she suffered a lot of pain
the last few months before passing away but she's with the Lord now,
so I think most of us who know her are at peace about it, but her
family may be going through a hard time.

I don't know if I'll be free this weekend...

Kath

On 2/2/06, Justin Ancheta wrote:
You up for a work session together on Sat./Sun.?

--justin

I met Irene only once, a long time before, back when I was still trying to fit myself in with the people at Katherine's church. She was a bubbly young woman, full of life and constantly smiling, a nucleus within an electron cloud of friends. I hung back and didn't bother to try to get to know her better, only content to just see her so happy. I'm best with socializing with people one-on-one and besides, she wouldn't have wanted a grumpy curmedgeon like me hanging around her. Well, okay, maybe not - but I know her friends at church maybe wouldn't have been so charitable...(And I mean that in a very comically dry sense - I wish that with all of the technology we have we could devise a way to communicate dry humour over the internet.)

It's funny, isn't it, how small our own problems become in the grand scheme of things, isn't it? Something which kinda sucks doesn't really suck once we measure it up against someone else's something, which really does suck a lot more than our own.