Thursday, May 06, 2004

Music-awards crunch week; not fun. (Though Sunday was pretty terrific; Sick Bees and Akimbo kicked ass, Codebase was his usual good self, and Siamese, whom I'd never heard, were surprisingly excellent--on paper, I'd have never given a bass-and-drum duo who play along with present drum and bass [the genre] beats, particularly post-brock-out junglist ones, a second look, but they evoked the moment before techstep turned into what my friend Tricia refers to as "oh-Mickey-you're-so-fine" tedium.) Drama with the family--also not fun, at all. (Let's just say my mother and my sister don't get along, and my mother needs to learn how to deal with people, not just her children, in a more constructive manner.) And then today, I found out my old coworker Jenn Wynne, the Weekly's editorial assistant during much of my initial tenure here (roughly mid-2000 through March '01; I think she left sometime late that same year) and one of the sweetest, most lively, and most competent people I have ever encountered, took her own life sometime last week. She was 24. I can't claim we were best friends or that I had even talked to her after I moved to New York, but when I was here I hung out with Jenn and her then-girlfriend Caroline a lot, and they're some of my favorite memories of Seattle and of that period of my life. I thought of her a lot while I was in New York, even after I found out she had moved to northern California; I always figured we would resume contact at some point. I tried Googling her a couple of times, to little avail; the name "Jennifer Wynne" is common enough not to yield particularly promising, or pinpoint, results. Now she's gone, and all I can think is what a horrible shame, what a thorough waste it is. This is a memorial site one of her friends started; I wrote something totally inadequate on it just to leave a mark, because it was the least I could do, and I'm writing this here, because it is the least I can do.