In my conversations with a friend, she made the statement that she wasn’t sure I was ready for a new relationship. Companionship, certainly, but relationship - maybe not. Her statement echoed thoughts of my own.
How do you know when you are ready, following a trauma, to rejoin that part of life the trauma impacted? We’ve all heard the adage about getting back on the horse, only in my case the horse died. (I know, figuratively not literally.) Do you try again only to get thrown again perhaps? Or do you wait for some internal mechanism to ‘ping’ when it’s time?
Perhaps it is a combination of both. Perhaps you keep getting back in the horse until you succeed in staying there, with little timeouts between attempts to recollect your wits and purpose. My purpose is to figure out what the next part of the rest of my life will look like. Who will be my friends? Where will I live? Will there be someone special with whom to share moments big and small?
Because I’ve seen first hand how fragile life can be, and how what is here today can be gone in an instant, I am reluctant to spend too much time collecting my wits between attempts. To my friend’s point however, I can see that rushing into new relationships before I’m ready could be hard, and not just for me. Those parts of my life that are individual I can be more daring with, take larger leaps of faith about. Areas that involve other people need more compromise, more sure-footedness. People who are new to the comic-tragedy that is my life’s play, probably shouldn’t be lobbed into the first half closer without time to at least learn their lines.
I am undaunted in my quest for new meaning in my life. I am nothing if not tenacious. However, I don’t think it will hurt if I slow down a bit.
Meeting people through a computer services has pluses and minuses. One of the biggest minuses is the totality of the end of communication. Once either party moves the match to “closed” the other party is helpless. Over the past few days I have been exchanging messages with a woman who I found to be very engaging and insightful. I was having fun “talking” to her.
Inexplicably this morning I found that she had closed the match and gave as her reason “other.” Her last message was very short, out of context and didn’t make sense to me. Going back and re-reading everything we wrote back and forth I cannot see what might have caused her to abandon the conversation. Her last message before the cryptic one ended with several questions that I was looking forward to answering.
Balls.
Morgan Spurlock, director and creator of the movie Super Size Me had a short-run program on F/X last year called “30 Days.” Well it’s back, and better than ever.
The first episode of season two tackles the issue of illegal immigration by placing a staunch anti-illegal immigration advocate into the home of a family of illegals. To make the man joining the family more interesting, he is a member of the volunteer group (Minutemen) who patrol the boarder and report illegal crossings to the authorities. Furthermore he himself is a legal immigrant, coming from Cuba in 1957 when Castro took over that country.
As was the case last year the story tells itself, and the ending may surprise you. I simply cannot think of a better program on television today. 30 Days puts you in the middle of the most charged situations in America today, moreover it puts a real face on the issue in a way that normal network television shuns.
Set your Tivo for F/X on Wednesday night.
This entry here at zanshin.net world domination headquarters is the thousandth since we starting counting back in December 1999. Clever readers may note that the posting URL actually says one thousand fifty three. Turns out that Movable Type, the content management system employed by el presidente for life Mark, uses the same pool of numbers for all the blogs under its domain. Therefore the extra fifty odd entries are from other sites that I have managed at one time or another.
If you are counting sit-ups or stairs, a thousand is a big number. If you are talking about stars in the universe or people on Earth, a thousand is pretty small. When you consider that these thousand entries span a sixth of my life, encompassing four deaths, two births, three job losses, and their subsequent cross-country moves, then it is a large number indeed.
Here’s the first thousand, and to many, many more.
In the book, and the movie, The World According To Garp there is a scene were young T. S. Garp is at the ocean’s edge and his mother yells to him to, “Beware the undertow!” The sound of the waves make it hard to hear so what Garp thinks she said was, “Beware the undertoad!” In his mind’s eye he sees a large menacing toad that lurks just underneath the waves and if you aren’t careful it’ll grab you and pull you under. For the rest of the book whenever bad starts to happen, or potentially could happen, Garp thinks about the undertoad.
In my journey back from depression’s edge I have, quite without being aware of it, wandered too far out and into the clutches of the undertoad. While I seemingly am progressing and functioning, privately I feel like I am spiraling down rather than climbing up. Wanting to put on a good face for the people around me I have managed to hide these little slips backwards even from myself.
Tonight, in a phone call with one of my best friends, that was at times contentious, very emotional, and ultimately uplifting and affirming, I broke free from the grasp of my undertoad and started moving towards shore once again. Talking with him provided the catalyst, the final straw, that enabled me to break down the “story for publication” that I had started to believe.
In truth I’m doing okay – as well as could be expected of someone who lost his wife nine months ago to suicide, and his mother barely two months ago to cancer. It’s okay that I’m not fully functional. It’s okay that I have bad days. It’s okay that I am at times very depressed. What isn’t okay is lying to myself about how I am doing. Pretending to myself that everything is hunky-dory only creates an imbalance in my life, and that imbalance can topple me right back to ground zero.
By exposing the falsehood tonight, by breaking down and raging and crying and finally allowing myself to hear the words of comfort and wisdom from my friend, I freed myself from the undertoad.
Nine years ago this evening I was at the rehearsal dinner for my wedding. Friends and family had gathered from Florida, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and Illinois to help us celebrate the occasion. The experience was heady and surreal, exciting and scary, wonderful and beautiful.
Nine years ago tomorrow, July 26, was my wedding day. I was able to stand in front of the people who were most important in my life and declare my intentions publicly. My memories of that day are snapshots, slices of people, words, and emotions. Like all weddings ours had some drama, some tragedy, a little comedy, and a whole lot of love. The best part was afterwards; having a house full of out of town guests sharing in our laughter and joy.
Tomorrow will be the first time I’ve crossed July 26 without being married in nine years. Tomorrow I will be one again, newborn and fragile. Struggling to find a way to make sense of this new world I’ve been born into. Learning and growing, setting aside the past but keeping the memories. Building a future on what came before.
There is an old saying, “what the caterpillar calls death the butterfly calls birth.” Michele’s caterpillar transitioned away from this world leaving me and mine behind. Tomorrow I will shed another layer of my chrysalis. Tomorrow I will continue my journey through life.
Several nights ago I had a very vivid dream about getting a tattoo. So vivid that I am still remembering it even now. The gist of the dream was that someone else (I don’t remember who), and I, decided to get full-lenght tattoos of pastel flames up our arms. The ink started at our wrists and ended at our shoulders. After the tattooing was completed I went home and went to sleep and in the morning woke up wondering what the hell I’d done to myself. And moreover, how was I going to get rid of the things now on my arms.
I think the symbolism here, since I know everything in the dream is me, is that I am making changes in my life right now that I can’t take back. Every day moves me farther and farther away from who I was, and who I thought I was going to be for the rest of my life. I can’t pinpoint any one event or decision that is as drastic as getting a two-foot long pastel flame design on my arms, so I am thinking that the dream was more a warning than a regret.
I want to move forward with my life, but I am scared of screwing things up. At times it feels like I’ve already screwed things up. How do I know that the decisions and choices I’m making now won’t make things worse? There’s no way to know without getting out of the abstract what-if world of my fears and actually moving forward with my life in the real world. in a very real sense this is what I am doing with the kendo club and by joining eHarmony. I don’t know where all of this is going, but I do know that the only way to get there is by taking the first step.
Eragon isn’t the best debut novel I’ve ever read, but it is certainly very good. Unfortunately it is a trilogy in progress; only the first two volumes have been published. I can start book two right away, but it appears I may have to wait a year or more to finish the tale.
Rating: Wait for book three and then read it all at once.
Having worked in the Information Technology field since it was called “data processing” I’ve been through several paradigm shifts. The first programs I wrote were stored on paper tape after having been coded on optical scan cards. (Yes, I’m really that “old.”)
The latest change is towards component or service based architectures. No longer will we create stand-alone applications, instead we’ll create an array of components that each provide discrete functionality. These components will all expose their services through interfaces, and higher level components (perhaps, business components) will choreograph these fine-grained ones into a coherent process that meets the needs of the end-application. The end application, be it web-based or not, will become thinner and thinner as more of the orchestration it used to perform is shifted down the hierarchy to the business choreography component.
Make sense? No. Good. Then you are keeping up with the rest of us. You see, in my humble opinion, service based component architecture is like teenage sex. Everyone wants to be doing it. Everyone is talking about it like they are doing it. No one really understands it. And, in fact, very few are actually pulling it off successfully.
Still, it’s where the industry is headed, so off I go reinventing my skill set once again. I’ve still got some of those old paper tape archives, maybe I need to scour eBay for a reader and return to a simpler paradigm where a program was a program was a program.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “process.thumbnail.jpg” }}