Somewhere in the last posting, or two, I crossed the three hundred thousand word mark on this site. The little counter at the top of the archive page tells me so.
That’s a lot of words.
Amazing what one guy, with no real purpose other than airing his emotional laundry, can do in six or seven years.
(Keep your 700 monkeys on 700 typewriters jokes to yourself.)
On a whim a week or two ago I ordered a package of “LIVESTRONG” bracelets and a bright yellow tee-shirt. At the time my thinking was, I know four people in my immediate family who were either impacted by, or died from cancer. After having the bracelet for a few days it occurs to me that there is a fifth person impacted in all the cases - me.
When I look at the LIVESTRONG logo on the band around my arm I take it as a reminder to me to live strong. To face life’s challenges head on, with verve and passion. This lifetime is too fleeting to be spent on the sidelines, or worse, in the stands, watching. LIVESTRONG is a composite word that sums up on of my favorite quotes of all time:
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man In The Arena”, Paris Sorbonne, 1910
I continue to lose weight at a surprising rate. Yesterday morning the scale read two-thirty-three, which is seventeen pounds lighter than when I started in early June. It appears that the Eat Less Do More (tm) diet actually works. I’ve been averaging about 1400 calories a day now and that seems to be enough less, combined with my increased physical activity, to help me lose weight. I’ve been told that ten pounds is a “size” so I’ll be in the market for new pants soon. My current rotation of work slacks are all getting lose around the waist.
I’ve also started to notice less pain and clicking from my knees. The first few weeks of kendo produced some new noises from the left knee in particular but, not only has the clicking gone away, the creaking I’ve had for years in both knees is less. I’m very careful about over extending them or injuring them.
I am now willing to be optimistic that I’ll not only reach my goal of two hundred pounds, but perhaps even one ninety or less.
For the past seven years I have cataloged and discussed all manner of things here on my site. For the most part I was uncaring about the results of recording bits of my life and casting them adrift on the sea of the Internet. Since joining eHarmony however, I’ve found myself being a bit more judicious about what gets posted here and what doesn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not ashamed of anything that I am or do. In the past I have shared some very painful and revealing episodes from my life here. What concerns me then, is establishing a context. The snippets of my life that I post here are just that, snippets. Someone reading some or all of these postings would get an idea about who I am. (What that idea is exactly isn’t clear to me - I’m too close the Mark tree to see the Mark forest.)
I am teetering on whether to expose my site to the matches I’ve been communicating with through eHarmony. Obviously this site would be a gold mine of information to someone just meeting me. Not knowing what conclusions they might reach as a result of reading it is what gives me pause.
My self confidence in relationships is not the same as say, my confidence at work, or in the martial arts. I’ve only been through a few relationship overtures and I’m not confident in myself. Therefore I’m less confident about exposing this site to potential new relationships. I think as I become more confident in the dating/relationship realm I’ll feel more comfortable about sharing this site with everyone, and I will be less worried about what to say here and what not to say.
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.