Two of my sisters had babies in the last forty-eight hours. Each had girls; one weighing 9 pounds 2 ounces the other was 9 pounds 11 ounces. These will bring my collection of nieces and nephews to nine. If I can get permission from my sisters I’ll post photos. Rest assured though, we’ve now got a grand total of 90 fingers and 90 toes, though J hasn’t given me a current count on her son’s digits.
So I’m going to try and start posting again. I may someday go into all the reasons why I stopped but not tonight. (I actually just deleted an entire post I had written outlining a few reasons but…well…maybe some other time.) I do want to get you caught up though. I’ve decided to just give you the top fifteen words that more or less sum up the past few months. If any strike your fancy, let me know and I may elaborate.
That sums it up kids.
So today I discovered that another old trend has started to emerge from my past. I am, it seems, that catalyst required for people to move on from their prior relationships. This is not to say that people move on with me, it is only the prospect of moving on with me that makes girls ready to date someone they actually like.
When you get rejected you get to indulge in some self pity for a bit. Lately I’ve even been robbed of that. The ‘relationships’ I’ve entered into lately have ended before they’ve started and the girls’ moving on has either been hidden or so far removed from my circumstances that the relationship was nearly invisible to begin with.
Still, rejection does hurt, even when it’s indirect. What hurts more though is that when something is hidden from me so I wouldn’t get hurt, it tells me that my feelings were considered and just didn’t matter.
My sleep patterns have been really off lately. One day last week I went to bed at 930 in the evening and was up and ready to go at 400, some two hours before I even start getting ready to go to work. Saturday I decided to lay back down at about 1030; I’d woken up not feeling very well at about seven. I slept until my sister called me at 200 wondering why I wasn’t at my nephew’s birthday party. And last night I was in bed by 900 and woke up at about 530.
Its not just my sleeping pattern that’s messed up though. I’ve long been weird about eating. I can easily go a day without eating, without even thinking about food. I literally forget to eat some days. The meals I do eat are usually in the mid-evening, around six or seven and then its often crap; fast food or frozen meals. Lately I’ve been hungry at weird times. I’ve eaten breakfast a few times in the past few weeks and even had a few days of three full meals.
There’s more that’s been off but this isn’t the forum for all that stuff. I don’t know what the cause of all this is. All I know is that I want things to go back to normal.
Last night I picked up a copy of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. I’ve read it before but it’s been a long time. There was a passage that I’m sure I would have been unmoved by when I read it the first time but on this reading it really stood out.
Do you remember that old TV series, Get Smart? You remember at the beginning where Maxwell Smart is walking down the secret corridor and there are all these doors that open sideways, and upside down and gateways and stuff? I think everybody keeps a whole bunch of doors just like this between themselves and the world. But when you’re in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller skate down your halls together.
The last few weeks have been hard but I wouldn’t give them up for anything. I opened my doors and though there was no roller skating, I did let someone walk down my corridor. In the end I didn’t have what she was looking for and that makes me sad but it was nice to have someone check the place out again.
Those of you who know me know that I can tell some really great stories about really bad birthdays. In the past I’ve spent my special day throwing-up all day, fighting with friends and family or even letting it go unnoticed.
This one was good though. I got up early to play golf with my brother-in-law E. Golf is hard - don’t let anyone tell you that its not. The truth is golf is the only thing I subject myself to that I am a complete and total failure at doing. It’s not that I get bogies when I want birdies and its not that I have a really, really bad hook. These are things that every golfer faces - even the pros from time to time. No, my problem is that I miss the ball…a lot. I’m talking sometimes seven or eight swings of the club to move the ball fifteen or twenty feet down the course.
It was hot yesterday. So hot that I didn’t finish the nine holes we’d agreed to play. I got through seven and had to stop. I was frustrated, sore and terribly hot. E was as encouraging as he could be. He reminded me that I only play about once a year (it was, in fact, one year to the day since we’d played last) and that I should just spend some time on the driving range to get my swing under control. To encourage me he gave me his spare set of clubs. Thanks E! Now I have to actually practice so next year I can show him my mad skillz.
There were birthday greetings scattered throughout the day. T, a girl from work, put a note on my car making her the first person to with me well, S sent a text message and J left a voicemail. My sisters T and J both called and I got to speak to my niece E for a few minutes (we share the birthday).
For dinner last night the family went to an Italian bistro in Knoxville. R and E bought my a steak dinner and there were presents. E and R, in addition to the golf clubs gave me a cap and a DVD. The nephew B who is always allowed to select the gift from him, got me a nifty pair of Simpsons boxers. From mom and dad was a shirt and a card. T has mailed a hat and she says something else - it should be arriving very soon I am told.
After dinner I went to the mall with R, E and the kids. The actual purpose of our visit will be gone over in another post as its just too good to bury four paragraphs down in this one, so I’ll leave it at we got ice cream and I got a flat tire.
Now back at home, S came by for some quality hanging out time. We went and got ice cream again, paid a visit to everydaycompanion.com to see what Panic was playing in Lousiville and that was pretty much the end of my day.
Thanks to everyone who made my day a good one. Birthdays are a funny thing. I personally think that everyone should get their own birthday off work. A special day just for you, like Presidents Day or Labor day - a day to recognize all that you do to support your employer and government.
So here’s to thirty. May it be better than 29.
So I missed this week’s Sunday Sampler.? I thought about it all day long but just didn’t feel up to the task and instead spent the day in other futile pursuits.? These tasks are not worth mentioning here, or much of anyplace so I’ll spare you the mundane details of how I spend my time when I’m not at work.
I turn thirty tomorrow.? In the past few weeks leading up to this day of days I haven’t been too concerned - its just another birthday after all. Most of my conversations have been related to my once oft-stated goal of retiring by the time I was thirty.? Now, as I sit here in my crappy one bedroom apartment, just a few hundred yards from where it all started nearly a third of a century ago, I feel like I haven’t made any progress.
Sure, sure.? I’m not covered in afterbirth and I dress a whole lot better, but I’m still rather dissapointed in my progress.? You see, life is not best measured in what you have, where you live or what you do - it should instead be measured by the relationships you’ve built, the people you’ve touched and the people who have touched you.
And it is through this lens that I see myself as a failure.? I don’t have relationships.? There are people that I talk to, even some I love; my family, S and J, M and L and maybe a few others.? But, apart from my family and S, I don’t really know this people, and they don’t know me.
Is it a lack of effort that has put me in this situation?? Maybe.? My mom and sister say I’m very quiet when I’m around other people.? That’s probably true.? The thing is I don’t remember how to build relationships with new people.? The people in my life, those listed before, are all pretty much those who have been in my life for years and years.
I do meet new people sometimes, you can’t go through life without meeting people you don’t know unless you completely leave society.? But it seems that the people I meet are already living full lives.? They have their friends, their family, their routines already established - there is no room for a new comer.
I often think about how I’d like to meet someone who has lost those ties - someone who, like me, has nothing better to do that go through all the boring getting to know you stuff that starts off most new friendships.? A transplant, an expatriot?? Someone who just needs a friend.
But these people are rare.? No one picks up a moves to a new city anymore, at least not without a pre-determined place to plug in.? I know when I moved to a new city I went because I already had people there; S and J, plus family if I got really lonely.
But this is not why we’ve come here today.? Today we’re here to talk about….
Sorry about the lack of posts this week, especially to all you new visitors. I’ve been trying to find a solution to the problem with the second post aligning with the lowest item on the sidebars. I even went as far as to post on a forum looking for help and had a brief exchange with someone who I thought was going to helpful before they lost interest. I’ve even toyed with the idea of starting over and just rewriting the whole thing - but this does not seem like an acceptable solution. I like the new look and don’t want to have to go through all this again.
In other news I’ve scrapped another personal project. I had decided I was going to try to grow my hair out a bit and see what a pro could do with it. It was getting really hot though so last night I went out to my sister’s house and got a hair cut. I also took the liberty of using her clippers to take out my beard. Maybe I’ll give it another go through the cooler months. I’ve requested some recent photos of me before the trim so I can post a before and after.
I’ve managed to get an .rss feed going. I’ve tested it in snarfer and in google’s browser based reader. For those of you who don’t know rss feed readers act a lot like Outlook, or at least the one I use does.? It retreives new posts from sites you subscribe to and it ‘feeds’ you new posts from sites you visit.? They call it browser-free but I don’t see how its really all that diffrent, except you’re automatically notified of new posts.
So thats it fow now kids. Sorry about the inactivity this week. Check back tomorrow for our Sunday Sampler.
The following is a best recollection of a conversation I had today. I have made a few changes in the interest of self preservation. Seguir leyendo »
I work for a top five-customer service firm and it probably goes without saying we have about a million policies that guide almost every task we do. Everything from the way we interview and hire to our processes for providing feedback and terminating employment is outlined in close to 150 documents.? We even have a guy, Mike, who checks our compliance with these policies.
A few weeks ago I was forced to end an agent’s employment. I completed a request for permission to terminate, had my manager sign off on the request that’d already been approved by people who rank higher than him and, after letting the poor guy go, ran the final paperwork including an form requesting his HR file be closed out, a checklist to say I filled out that form and an automated script that included the same information that I’d just put onto the original form. Seguir leyendo »