the middle name

She thinks my middle name is Marie, but it's not. For the past 17 years she has believed my middle name to be Marie. I cannot express to you in words the sheer hilarity of her ignorance, because my middle name is, and has always been, Michele. All the years she has searched for me, she's looked for a Brandi Marie. I have to admit it has a better ring to it than Brandi Michele, but it's my name and it will forever be that way. As my 3rd grade teacher would say, "close, but no cigar!"

I hate that she signs her messages to me as, "I love you, Grandma."
How does she know she loves me? I could be a serial-killer for all she knows.

I finished Maus II today, i cried a lot in a few parts. The part when Vladek describes the children being taken from the ghettos and taken by their feet and slammed against the walls to kill them, really struck a nerve with me. I am imagining my little brother and sister being taken by uniformed men and killed for sport in the middle of the street. I'm finishing Night by Elie Weisel and still continuing The Diary of Anne Frank, hopefully I'll finish it this week because I've rented the movie from the library and it's gotten good reviews.


Ever since I started researching the holocaust for the past few months now, I've been having dreams of being stuck in Auschwitz and Birkenau and forced to dig ditches for corpses to be thrown into and burned. They are not the most pleasant of dreams, and I wake up crying, but I believe it's the closest I'll ever get to understanding the horror of being taken prisoner by the Nazis.

I have yet to find an explanation to why I'm so connected to this tragedy. When i'm not reading about it, or watching movies/documentaries about it, I am thinking about it. maybe it's because I can't believe that in 4 years 6 million people were killed in the most inhumane of ways. Everything reminds me of it, when I look at an archway all I see is "Arbeit Macht Frei"(at the entrance to Auschiwitz 1), when i see piles of shoes I think of the trip i took to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. 5 years ago, and the room filled with the shoes of the deceased.

Whatever is connecting myself to this, is changing my life forever.