I Didn't Sign Up for You

Forgive me for mishearing the lyrics of "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," but I've used the phrase "I didn't sign up for this" as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying, "This wasn't part of the experience I had imagined prior" for years.

My older daughter is finishing up her first year of college, with finals wrapping up tomorrow afternoon. About two weeks ago, she told her mother and me that she didn't think she was going to pass her algebra class. 

This would be the second time she had taken this class because she had failed said course in the fall. What's worse is that the material was no harder than what she had already covered in her high school years, where she supposedly passed two years of algebra and a year of pre-calculus.

Putting aside my own frustration, I sought to help her get a realistic assessment of her chances. We looked at the syllabus to determine the basis for the grade, noting the weight for tests, quizzes, homework, and finals.

She had done a good chunk of her homework, but there were some chapters where she had not done much. Tests and quizzes were awful. Since the homework was done through an online system, we could view a ramp of progress over the semester. It looked like sometime in March, she had gone into a lull, and after that she had put in some effort, but not enough to improve things much.

The instructor reopened some of the modules so that she could resume working on them, and I put in time with her via Zoom to get her back on pace. By yesterday evening, she had completed 90% of the exercises successfully. 

Side note: She had been on edge the past few weeks already because the front axle broke on her car, leaving her without wheels. Since her mother works from home some days, she was able to use her mom's minivan a few days, but on days she was without a vehicle, she was taking Lyft to her work, which was about a mile from her residence hall and not safe to walk alone in the evening.  There is a lead for a used car that she should be able to pay cash on for most of it, but the seller had to get a title reissued, which will mean that she's without a vehicle for another week or two.

At the end of last week, she came home because she had a dance competition on Sunday. She had a meeting with an academic advisor on Tuesday, and she had to work on Wednesday. She had only two classes that had finals. One was an online exam for an English class, and the algebra final was on Friday afternoon. 

Her mother an I agreed that I would provide a ride for her to campus on Tuesday for the adviser meeting, help move out some things, and then bring her home with me so that she could focus on studying algebra. I would take her to work on Wednesday evening. My hope was that she would devote today to working through the final exam practice materials her instructor had posted.

Instead, we spent most of the afternoon packing up and moving her out of her residence hall. She lacked boxes for smaller things, so we spent about an hour organizing things to go into the boxes, and then we got some lunch and I managed to get some empty boxes from a liquor store. We packed up the items and got a basket cart from the front desk. My car, a sedan, was packed pretty tight, but nothing was left behind. I was tired and not in the best mood, but I was doing my best to not raise the temperature by expressing frustration at her.

I drove her to her mother's house to unload the materials. By then it was just before 4, and downtown traffic was clogged with early rush traffic. The closure of a section of major interstate for the past year or so has resulted in some serious clogginess. We made the trip, in about double the time it takes in light traffic. So I was really worn down.

On the way home, she was trying to convince me to leave her at her mom's instead of taking her back with me so that she could study more for algebra. I said I didn't think that was a good idea because I worried she would be more inclined to watch TV than study at her mom's. Moreover, her computer and final exam study materials were at my house. I also didn't want to make a trip back in the midday to pick her up for her final.

When we arrived at her mother's, she said she was going to stay there anyway. I said that's fine, but that she would need to figure out how she was going to get her computer and materials because I wasn't going to make the round trip to bring them to her. That would have been another hour's time at my expense.

At this point she just lost it. She started throwing the items she had in her hand on the ground... a hand vacuum, her cell phone, her lanyard, and a towel. She yelled obscenities at me. Told me that she was glad that she could say what she really felt and that I wasn't her father (she's adopted). I didn't say anything to her because I didn't want to escalate. I carried items into the house and placed them in her room because her mother was clear that she didn't want them in the family room.

I went home trying to process all of that. There had been times when she had been angry with me, but never to this level of intensity of language and never with throwing of objects. About 40 minutes later, she texted, "I'm sorry I said all that stuff to you. I did not mean to get upset with you." I didn't answer because it felt like an abusive pattern, and I didn't want to feed it.

I exchanged some texts with her mother afterwards to keep her in the loop about what was going on. She wasn't home when all of this happened. She said that our daughter had behaved similarly at times with her. I told her about the text and not replying. She suggested I send her a list of the items that were here, and I did, without any additional commentary to avoid escalation.

As she was raging, my daughter was bringing up stuff I had said in the past that she said made her angry at me. One of them was the phrase, "I didn't sign up for that," in reference to something I had to deal with as a parent. I can't even remember exactly what was being discussed when I used the phrase, but she interpreted it in the most negative way I could imagine.

She contacted her best friend from her high school days and got picked up to go to her apartment. They came to my house to pick up the materials she still had here. It was a brief exchange and she was icy. Her friend did well in math, so she might be able to help her prepare for the exam in a way that I wasn't able to.

This was difficult for me because on one hand, I didn't want to reinforce abusive behavior, but on the other, I didn't want her to fail her class by not studying after we had put in all that effort. Ultimately, though, she is an adult now, so she needs to be responsible for the things she does. I had sacrificed and rescheduled to work around her times as best as I could. It was out of my hands now.

About 10:00 tonight, I had a rare weekday glass of wine. I don't like doing that.

The Wait is Over

Previously...

Three or so years later...

 

 

Was it Really that Long Ago?

 (Checking blog archives...)

(Notices the date stamp of the first post...)

Fifteen years?

Five years since the blog was officially ended?

Yeah, that time did all fly by.

(Composes self...)

To those who stumble upon this blog using search or whose RSS feeds still point here, greetings!

I'm still here. Maybe it would be easier to catch up by noting what has changed over last half decade.

2016 was a rough year. In addition to it being sort of a Rapture of the Talented, my father died in May. A dog we had adopted back in 2001 just before the 9/11 attacks had to be put to sleep because of deteriorating health. Finally, I got a better feel for the density of racist @$$holes in the United States and it depressed me utterly.

The next few years were a blur because it seemed like an endless stream of awful in the political sphere. I became more active, attending protests, writing letters to representatives and calling them, and even trying to register voters.

I changed jobs in 2019 to go work for a startup founded by some co-workers at my prior job and realized that a couple of them, too, had worldviews that were either steeped deeply in the alternative fact universe or just too lacking in empathy to be worthy of respect.

A source of stability in all of this was my girlfriend, with whom I had been in a relationship since 2011. With her older child graduating from high school in 2017, we started to make plans toward combining households. I had some repair work done to my house in 2018, but there were some issues with the drain that required me moving out towards the end of 2018, and I haven't lived there since.

With a home equity line of credit, I continued to work on repairs and get rid of stuff we didn't want to keep under a combined house. Then in the summer of 2020, a lavatory feed line burst while I was on vacation and it resulted in requiring major restoration that continues to this day. I'm hoping to have the house on the market by the fall and finally out of my hands. Fortunately, the real estate market here has been strong, and I've had neighbors ask me if I am planning to sell.

 The relationship with my girlfriend has been strong. She has been supportive of me through some dark times, and I have been there for her struggles, too. Sometimes the spectre of discontent lurks in my peripheral consciousness, but I've accumulated enough tools to keep it in check. The filters that see only the negative can sneak in unnoticed, but once I see them there, I can push them out of the way.

My line of work has evolved. Since early 2008, I had been working on developing web applications using a loathed dynamic language that begins with a "P" and JavaScript. When I changed jobs in 2013, I transitioned to different, more respected language that also begins with a "P." By 2016, I had gotten involved with data sciency stuff at my employer and started to learn about machine learning, which propelled me into the startup I'm working at now.

I have slowly started to make and maintain contact with old friends from my college days, including two people with whom I roomed for two years back in my undergraduate days. I might actually show up at my 30-year homecoming this fall if the pandemic isn't too crazy again.

My older daughter graduated from high school in early June and is planning on attending college this fall. She's had some emotional struggles this past year because her birth family reached out to her over social media during the pandemic (long story). While she has met her birth sister and a half-sister a few times to exchange gifts, she has been reluctant to meet with the birth parents.

My younger daughter, who used to have intense bouts of anxiety about missing me in her grade school years has managed to move on. She's had a boyfriend for about two years going. She's entering her junior year of high school and will be taking classes through a local career center toward an associates degree.

More recently, I received word that a high school teacher from my hometown had passed away. I had taken several of my math classes with him and had a high regard for him because it was in high school that I really got bitten by the math bug.

I've debated traveling back to my hometown for the visitation, but I think I will make a donation in his memory to a charity mentioned in his obituary. I feel estranged from my hometown because the area is staunchly conservative, with an emphasis on gun culture. I didn't know his family that well, and I don't have any contact with anyone in town except for my step mom. Moreover, with COVID-19 cases on the rise, I'm not really feeling up for a large gathering, even though I reach full vaccination as of late May.

I may pop in here now and then to write down some things just so I can re-read them and get perspective, but I can't guarantee huge volumes of overanalyizng and agonizing. I don't really want to go back there because when I look back at some of those posts, I don't like what I see. Maybe that's a sign that I've grown? I dunno.

The Benefits of Keeping a Journal

 On Saturday, the New York Times published an article about the benefits of keeping a journal. It made me think of this blog, which served a sort of a journal, yet hiding in plain sight. Comparing this space with the guidelines from the article, I cringe at some of the things I dwelt upon or in the way I expressed them. Still, I highly recommend journaling as therapy and encourage you to read the article.

With respect to relationships, I have been in a wonderful one for nine years now, hence my choice to remain silent on this space. The things that unsettle me have more to do with the present Zeitgeist, and I don't believe anything I would have to write would add anything new to the conversation.

The spectre that haunts me now has more to do with the suffering of others and the questions I ask of myself are what I can do by action or donation to replace that suffering with justice.  

Submitted, Without Commentary

SOS! Will Abba's new music live up to their legacy?

I am pleased and hopeful.

Ten Years After (or Here's Where the Story Ends)

On this day in 2006, I published my first post on this blog.  For the first two years, I churned out a lot of content, as I chronicled and digested the latter days of my marriage to X.  The legal dissolution of that union was finalized over six years ago.  As the xkcd Timeghost would put it, "The end of your marriage is clooooser to the first day of the post of your blog than it is noooow."

I almost let the 10-year mark pass by unnoticed.  I hopped onto Feedly this morning to check the RSS feeds for blogs I followed when this blog was much more active.  The only public blogs that continue to publish periodically are The Drunken Housewife, The Edge of Vanilla, and I am Doing the Best I Can.  On the private side, Anais continues to publish on Dancing with Myself.

I was surprised to see that Phyllis Renée of the Diggersphere had resurfaced after a long hiatus.  In her June 21, 2016 post, she noted that she had gone through a divorce, and that prompted me to go to my own blog and check the date of the first post.  Sure enough, the first post was dated July 17, 2006.  Then I looked to see when my last post was... mid-June 2015!  Over a year of blogging silence.

Over the years, I've tried to envision how I would bring this blog to a close.  Back in 2007, when I was contemplating moving to the Bay Area after the collapse of my marriage and the realization that my employer at the time was teetering on the abyss, I thought I would wrap up the blog, and move on to a new chapter in a separate blog, maybe 3 am Eternal, but that never happened.

I continued to use the blog to give updates to followers as I tried to chart a new course for my life.  I grew a lot, both emotionally and professionally.  I also passed through some very dark phases of loneliness.  I had some relationships along the lines of Sam Phillips' "Stay with Me," craving intimacy and companionship, but not willing to develop a deep romantic bond.

I met someone in mid 2011, someone a few years older than I.  We happened to be only a couple miles apart from one another, and we had much in common.  The relationship blossomed, with our attentions focused almost solely on one another on the weekends we didn't have our kids.  Eventually I would get introduced to her family, and we got along very well.  The loneliness that had haunted me both in marriage and on my own finally seemed to dissipate.

At the end of 2012, I bid my employer, Company Line, farewell, and set off on a new path, working for the state's largest college.  I liked the people at my new job, but I hated the commute because it was 20 miles away, and not feasible by bus.  The job meant a good sized pay cut, and my house started to have troubles with the roof and drain.  Plans to blend households got put on the back burner.

Also complicating things was my love's ex, who was becoming less reliable.  That meant that a lot of our kid-free weekends got the kibosh because the ex had too much month at the end of the money, so he wasn't able to do things like feed his son.  The daughter, going into her high school years, started to refuse to go to her dad's and became increasingly jealous of the time my love and I spent together.

2014 was a hard year, and I fell into deep depression.  I started to see the cancelled weekends as my love putting distance between us.  My insecurities about being unlovable kicked into high gear.  Still, I wasn't so overcome with my emotions that I could see that I needed help.  I took advantage of my employer's EAP to get some counseling to sort things out.

With 2015, things got a little better as we started to have overnights even when her daughter decided to stay.   I went on medication.  I looked for a higher paying job, but wound up staying with my current employer after getting a promotion to something that aligned better with my career goals.  By this time, I had grown tired of web application development and wanted to make the transition into data science.

 While I still miss our weekends of complete togetherness, I've reached a place where I can talk with her about how we can share time together, even when the kids are around.  We have a weekly night where we have dinner together at her house.  We go to church together on Sundays.  We keep connected with texts during the day and we talk on the phone nightly when we don't see each other in person.  We make it a point to get out and see live music together by ourselves on a regular basis, because this is one thing that touches us on a deep level.

Do I wish we had greater physical intimacy?  Yes, but I don't feel the hurting like I did with X.  My love and I remind each other in some subtle ways that we crave each other, and when we do get alone time, it is wonderful.  The difference is that I feel desired for who I am, just as I desire her for whom she is.  We share our lives as much as we can, given our circumstances, and we continue to plan for a day where we will be under one roof and sharing the same bed.

Outside my relationship, life continues to be busy.  My daughters are now 13 and 11.  I'm very much a part of their lives.  Both are active in dancing and learning piano.  The older one is more athletic and runs both distance and track events.  My younger daughter loves the creative arts.  She takes lots of art classes and works on crafts on her own volition.  She also has inherited my propensity for anxiety, which challenges her mother and gives me pause to reflect on how I would have liked my parents to have helped me manage my own anxiety.  We'll be going on a vacation with my love's family in the week to come.  They get along with them very well.

I have become increasingly involved in the church where my love grew up.  It's a struggling congregation.  It served an area that was once more middle class 40 - 50 years ago.  The loss of major employers in the area in the 70s and 80s meant that some of those folks moved away, or their kids moved on as they grew up because opportunities were elsewhere.  Others left as the congregation took a more progressive direction on matters of sexuality.

I like the pastor because she is very honest about her own humanity.  Although it is the same denomination as the church I grew up in, this church takes a less literal view on scripture, emphasizing the importance of being agents of God's love rather than God's wrath.  Over the past year, we have come to realize that if we don't develop a stronger connection of service to our neighbors, the congregation will die out, so we've been hard at work trying to examine where we do need to change, and I have been active in helping to chart that course.

My father passed away two and a half months ago, after almost 15 years of physical deterioration from a stroke.  His own challenges have haunted me over the years.  The stroke hit him early into his early retirement years, at the age of 51.  On one level, I was relieved to see the end of his suffering, but I also grieved over the moments where his aliments limited what he could do with the grand kids and me.  My mother is still alive and in mostly good health.  She lives up in the northeast suburbs now with two rescued St. Bernards as companions.

Anyway, I'm making my way through life, accompanied by the ones I love.  I've become more grateful for what I have.  I'll probably still have flirtations with existential dread, but I'll do my best to use them as passages of growth.  With this post, I am hereby freezing this blog, with no future posts to follow.  I'll still be reachable at the e-mail address in the sidebar.  If I know you well enough, I'll give you my Twitter account handle so you can follow the day-in and day-out stream of my consciousness.

As surely as this Sunday has come to an end, so does this blog.  But it will remain here to serve as a guide post for others who may have found themselves in a similar situation.  I leave you with one last late night listen.

For Your Amusement Only - IBM Watson Visualizes a Post

IBM's Watson Twitter account recently tweeted a link to a page where you could paste a writing sample for its algorithms to analyze with respect to personality.  Just for grins, I decided to submit my "Self Dissolution" post from Dec. 31, 2006, less the book excerpts and lyrics.  This is what it returned as a result:

You are sentimental and guarded.

You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are organized: you feel a strong need for structure in your life. And you are calm-seeking: you prefer activities that are quiet, calm, and safe.

Your choices are driven by a desire for discovery.

You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with achieving success: you make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy!

Those of you who have read this space for a while may remember a prior post about a woman from my past whose advances had haunted me over the years.  I was reminded of her today with the news that her ex-husband, whom she met while at the school we both attended, had been found dead.  It wasn't a clipping forwarded by a friend.  It was the RSS feed for the Old Grey Lady and a tweet for an Associated Press "Big Story" article.  Some searching turned up that she herself had since moved on, with a new last name.  She's almost 50 now.

On the Passing of an Old Classmate

Submitted without further commentary...

Time it was
And what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences 

Long ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you. 

-- Simon & Garfunkel,
"Bookends",
Bookends,
Columbia Records

She departed this life last December, I learned today.   I had not seen her since I graduated from college.

Facing an Old Demon

Last weekend, I was introduced to X's current boyfriend.  It's been six years since she moved out of the house, but this is the only one of them I have met.  I've never asked for much information in this area, and she's never volunteered much about them, other than to ask if the kids could stay with me on nights when she had plans.  I know of only one other former boyfriend by name, and that was only because he was the sibling of a prominent radio personality here.

The introduction was cordial.  He seems like a good guy.  He has a daughter about the same age as our older daughter.  He was there so that X could introduce him to the kids and go out for ice cream together.

Emotionally, it was much more difficult than I had imagined it being.  Although I have no feelings for X, my feelings of rejection in that relationship haunt me still, even more so given the downshift in together time I've had in my own romantic relationship.  Putting a face and a name to what she wanted, at least superficially, gave me the impression that she wanted something very different out of a man than me.

That demon of undesirability is lurking in the dark reaches of my mind.  The weekends that my girlfriend and I normally would spend together are now just maybe a few hours together.  Dinner at a restaurant or sitting together at church.  I struggle with the feeling that while she says she is unhappy with it, she is really OK with it, or at least doesn't feel the same pain that I feel when I realize that we won't be spending that time together.

 I've been trying to channel energy into things that I've needed to do for a while -- yard work and decluttering to name a couple things.  I don't have a lot of disposable income, so getting out of the house to do things that cost money seems infeasible, and going places where there are a lot of people by myself feels weird, like I'm being unfaithful to the relationship.

My Moribund 2am RSS Feeds

Started to take a look at the blogs that I used to follow via Google Reader many a year ago. I migrated them to Feedly when Google did its Spring Cleaning shutdown of Reader.  Most of the feeds have gone dormant.  Only Anais (Dancing with Myself), Dawn (I am Doing the Best I Can and other blogs), Tom Allen (The Edge of Vanilla), and Drunken Housewife are posting with any degree of regularity.  Here is a listing of each blog in my feed and the number of days since the last post was published.

1. ...For a Different Kind of Girl (Eponymous) - 506
2. A Very Merry Un-Birthday (Mandy Lou) - 1151
3. Dancing with Myself (Anais) - 4
4. Deepest Darkest Thoughts (Trueself)- 178
5. Drunken Housewife (Eponymous) - 32
6. I Am Doing the Best I Can (Dawn) - 6
7. I Should've Been Famous by Now (Tajalude) - 1004
8. Mind Blowing Insanity (Jinsane) - 165
9. Never Judge a Book by its Cover/Blogger (Cat) - 1175
10. Never Judge a Book by its Cover /Wordpress (Cat) - 772
11. Phyllis Renee (Eponymous) - 1562
12. Reality & Redemption/Wordpress (Digger Jones) - 173
13. Reality & Redemption/Blogger (Digger Jones) - 1871
14. The Edge of Vanilla (Tom Allen) - 29
15. The Eyes Have It (Fiona) - 138
16. Unsolicited Advice/Blogger (Digger Jones) - 2052
17. Unsolicited Advice/Wordpress (Digger Jones) - 455

 This doesn't include blogs that have shut down, like Meet Joe Flirt, Therese in Heaven, and Law Girl, and Euro Posh, or the blogs that have gone private like Have the T-Shirt, and Fade to Numb.

What blogs do you miss?

Playing the Hand You're Dealt

Last weekend, we had the closest thing to one of "our weekends" that we've had in a long time.

My girlfriend's ex-husband got paid late last week, which meant he had money, so he promised his son that he'd come get him for the weekend.  He cancelled the Friday evening pickup, claiming he had to work and promising to pick him up the next day.  Actual pickup time was Saturday afternoon at 3 pm.  No explanation given.  He was driving another new used car, the third or fourth that he's had so far this year.

It was almost an overnight for us, but her daughter's plans for the weekend fell through when the friend she was going to stay with got sick, complications from hypoglycemia.  With no other plans, she was going to stay home, so that put the overnight plans into the "nope" column.  The three of us met for dinner, and then she took her daughter home so she could come over to see me.  We had about four hours of together time, which was reinvigorating.

I shared with her my feelings that the lack of together time this year had been a drain on me.  I also made it clear that I didn't blame her.  I knew she didn't have control of her ex-husband.  But it was also true that I was experiencing severe loneliness due to the unpredictability and infrequency of our time together.  She said she didn't like the way things were for her.  She said she knew we needed time away from the kids so we could talk freely in a way you can't when you're on the phone or texting.  She said was able to "compartmentalize" that and go on, realizing that this was just how things were going to be for a while because she didn't see him getting any better about being there for his kids.

We talked about how we could be more creative about finding time to be alone.  She floated the idea of changing up our weekly dinner night so that instead of me coming to her house, she would come to mine without her kids. She would make them something for dinner and let them eat by themselves.  Her kids are 15 and 12, so they can handle a few hours on their own.

We tried it out this past Wednesday.  I had dinner ready for us and we snuggled after that, spending about three hours together.  I asked her how her kids were dealing with this arrangement, and she said her daughter (the 15 year-old) was OK with it, but the son wasn't happy, complaining that she was probably going to eat something better than what they were having.  Although it hurt to see her go, we were both happy with it, so we will probably make this the new weekly routine.

Got a phone call from X this evening letting me know that when I bring the kids home on Sunday evening, her boyfriend was going to be there and she was going to introduce him to the kids.  She said that the kids know about him, so this wouldn't blindside them.  I guess I will get to meet him as well.  Should be interesting.

Work is still grinding on me.  The project that I was conscripted as tech lead for about a month ago is hitting issues with resource allocation, with a consultant whom they hoped to have lined up not ready to go.  Realizing this, the powers that be have agreed to extend the completion date, which was already way too aggressive.  I'm getting some interest from recruiters, so I've been telling them that I won't be available until the project winds down, which will be most likely October now.

Dusting the Sidebar

I've revisited the links on my sidebar to weed out dead or less useful links. Among those impacted: Spirits Using Me

• Updated a broken link for Western Pennsylvania Family Center
• Removed links for book authors Weiner Davis, Schnarch, and Glover. The material on these sites seem to become heavier on the glitzy marketing and lighter on substance. Probably a sign of the times or the fact that I'm just so sick of what marketers do.

Larger Voices Calling

Links to the following websites have been removed because they have gone private.

• Never Judge a Book by Its Cover (Wordpress)
• Reality and Redemption (Blogger)
• Unsolicited Advice (Blogger)

Surprisingly enough, it's only the Blogger-hosted Digger Jones sites that have gone private. The Wordpress blogs remain. On the other hand, Cat's Blogger-hosted "Never Judge" site remains accessbile, but dormant.

Probitionate in Situ is accessible via click-through on the Blogger-provided NSFW consent button.

I removed the link to Incurable as it appears that this blog has been shut down.

I updated the link to Difficult Relationships.

Of all of these blogs, only Drunken Housewife and The Edge of Vanilla continue to post on a regular basis. The Eyes Have It resurfaced a few months back to lament a marriage lost.

I remember when the Diggersphere was a much livelier place. I kinda miss it these days.

Late Night Listening XLIII: Silver Lining

There’s no starting over
No new beginnings time races on
And you've just gotta keep on keeping on
Gotta keep on going
Looking straight out on the road
Can't worry 'bout what's behind you
Or what's coming for you further up the road
-- First Aid Kit
"My Silver Lining"
Stay Gold
Jagadambs

You know if I'm writing a Late Night Listening post, I must be in a dark space. :-)

Before I talk about the bad, I will start off by saying that today was a productive day for me in terms of domestic tasks. I did get some housecleaning done, and the kids were surprised by how much better things looked than last week.

I'm in one of those stuck frames of mind where I feel like I don't have the physical and emotional resources to cope with life in a balanced way. It's a struggle for me to avoid letting an awful narrative take root in my consciousness. It's the narrative that argues that no matter how hard I work, scrimp, and save, there will always come along a circumstance where I will lose ground that can never be made up.

It's been a month since I used my sixth and final free EAP session through my employer. They helped me to get past the feeling of utter futility that I had been struggling with since the murder of a coworker back in April. And with my counselor's encouragement, I worked to get involved with a monthly writer meetup to give myself some contact with others.

I think I am suffering from depression. I know that I need to do something about it. I know that depression can warp a worldview to the point of self destruction. I don't think I can talk myself through it. While trying to reframe the situation and de-isolate do help some, it's not enough.

I probably need medication, but nothing has really worked for me. I did fluoxetine, the hometown favorite, back in 2002 - 2003 and that just made me sleepy. After a year, I felt like I was just in a fog all the time. In 2010, I tried escitalopram, and that just killed off sexual pleasure and gave me diarrhea. Went to desvenlafaxine, but the insurance company said that they wouldn't cover it, so we went to venlafaxine, which also killed off sexual pleasure, which just left me in an even crankier state. I gave it another try in 2013, but my new employer's insurance plan wouldn't cover it, and the generic unisured price was so hight I couldn't afford it. I don't know if I have enough runway to continue trying new medications.

My relationship with my girlfriend has undergone a downshift, and I'm not sure how much of it is circumstance, and how much of it is her pulling back. Up until the early part of this year, we would see each other once a week to eat dinner at her house. We'd go to her church on Sundays. On alternating weekends, when we didn't have the kids, she would come over and spend the weekend with me. Since spring started, we've spent only a couple of nights together, and I can't remember the last time we had a weekend to ourselves.

Depression makes it easy to fall trap to the narrative that she's pulling away, and I've had more than one weekend where I've been consumed with loneliness and preparing myself for the possibility that she might reach a point where she doesn't want to be with me anymore.

In reality, I know it is more complicated than that. When we first started dating, both of her kids would go to her ex's. When she was in eighth grade, the older child started hanging out with a couple of girlfriends of hers, spending weekends with them. When her father had to move out of his rental house and into a mobile home, she stopped going over there altogether. Over the past seven or eight months, she stopped spending weekends at her friend's house, which meant that my girlfriend couldn't spend the night anymore on those nights.

Over the past four or five months, the ex-husband has been cancelling out on weekends with his son, claiming that he had to work or didn't have enough money for food. Despite promises to make up the weekends, that never seems to happen. Many times, the ex-husband doesn't even give notice that he's cancelling out.

I could deal with these things by themselves. Granted, she could take him to court for not upholding his part of the custody agreement, but there are other signs that make me wonder. For example, there have been two or three times over this period where she and I did not have kids, and when I asked her if she wanted to spend time together, she would either remain non-committal and say nothing or say that she had other things to do, like go grocery shopping.

I restrain myself, trying to keep the insecurity in check. I double check my behavior to make sure that there isn't anything that could make me seem needy or smothering.

One of the evenings when we had dinner, I told her that I missed our "us" time. She said she did, too, but she said that she thought it was temporary. I didn't ask for clarification on what her notion of "temporary" was, and maybe I should have. I don't see it coming to an end in the near future. If her ex-husband keeps ignoring his part of the agreement, it will be a long time indeed because the son is only 12 years old.

Recently, my girlfriend said she started taking a series of classes about homeownership from the local neighborhood housing partnership. Her sister took the classes a couple of years ago in the process of buying her own house. She said she didn't have any definite plans, but she does currently rent a house she's been in for the past seven years. I know that the landlord had approached her about buying the house.

The voice of my insecurity whispers to me that because she's said little about these classes, that she's planning to go her own way eventually. I'm mired down with my own house, and their isn't enough room for her and the kids here. There isn't enough room at her house, either.

That voice grinds on me in my loneliest hours and it saps me. It is corrosive and it plays to my deepest fears that I cannot be loved wholly because I am stretched so thin as to be a good catch. I can escape it temporarily, but I can't silence it, and I hate that.

As for work, I'm at a point where I'm ready to look elsewhere. I'm stuck for a couple more months maybe because I was conscripted to be the tech lead on a highly visible death march project. I'll write more on that on another post. My radio station is playing this song, and I'm drifting off to sleep.



That song never grows old.

Of Spreadsheets Between the Sheets

I try to avoid the clickbait, but a couple of recently published stories on Huffington Post about disgruntled spouses keeping spreadsheet logs of their moribund sex lives were just too much temptation for me. Read them at your own peril.

• Man Sends Wife Spreadsheet Of All Her Excuses Not To Have Sex
• Yes, Sexually Frustrated Wives Can Make Sex Spreadsheets Too

Although it's been eight years since I started this blog and seven years since my marriage experienced it's fatal cracks, these articles made me stop to think about just how much dissatisfaction with my sex life consumed my existence back then. Same goes for many of the now defunct blogs on the sidebar. In a way, we were all keeping anonymous prose logs of our own frustrations.

We don't know the full back story of the spreadsheeting spouses, and there might be plenty of blame to go around. Regardless of the level of exclusivity within a relationship, our choices to be sexual with our partner should be consensual, not forced out of an asymmetry of power or coerced through guilt and resentment.

I don't buy the communication-is-the-key mantra usually arises in relationship clashes. It is indeed necessary, but not sufficient. I believe that for an intimate relationship to sustain itself, there has to be an agreement on what constitute the foundations of the relationship. If there isn't a willingness to find that common ground, the relationship becomes a toxic power struggle, usually based on who can get and withhold the most.

Looking back on what was my own marriage and seeing X's relationships since then, I realize I wasn't a good fit for her. The things I thought would make her happy, didn't. She's definitely attracted to people who look and act very different from me. I just wish she would have felt more freely to tell me this earlier on in the relationship, because the facade was painful and puzzling to me.

I have more to write on where my life is currently, but I'll save that for a separate post.

Conjuring Up Animal Spirits

Psychic Entropy (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991)

information that conflicts with existing intentions or that distracts people from carrying out intentions

Over the past several months, I've been finding myself visiting and revisiting in a dark emotional space. It is not despondency. All is not lost. I still have enough perspective to know there are many in the world who are enduring much worse than me.

No, the specter that haunts me is that loss is accelerating with time, and with that there is little renewal or recovery. My resources for coping financially and emotionally seem to be on an irreversible path to exhaustion, and what scares me is what I will do if I reach that point.

Yes, I keep the bills paid, and I haven't fallen behind on anything. Still financial hits keep hitting, depleting me of my savings, and I don't ever seem to have much room for replenishing savings.
The biggest hit by far was having to replace the roof back in September. That wiped out close to two thirds of my savings. I took another hit in October when I had a drain clog. The installation of a cleanout cost me $750.

The severe winter stressed me out because I was worried about the furnace giving up the ghost. It seems like every couple of years, the igniter has to be replaced at a cost of a couple hundred dollars, and the last time the furnace tech was out here, he said that it was probably time to get the heater and central air replaced. Fortunately, the furnace didn't die, even in the worst of the bitter cold from the polar vortex. To be sure, I kept the thermostat as low as 61°F, and I had to fight the temptation to listen to the furnace every time it ran for evidence that there were problems.

At the end of February, I started having slow drains and burbling toilets whenever I drained the sink or washed clothes. The first plumber who responded said I had raw sewage coming into the crawl space and needed to have a restoration service come out and fix things before they could look into doing any repairs. He said at a minimum they would have to replace the cast iron pipes and relay part of the line out to the sewer, which would start at $3,700.

Opting for a second opinion resulted in a less severe diagnosis. They rain the drain cleaning and found roots. That cost me $250, and I know that I will need to have the pipe redone because the house is 50 years old. I need to get estimates for that, too.

My brakes needed work done in late March, which cost me another $430.

I not only lost a coworker to meaningless gun violence at the beginning of the month, I was the one who took the call from his father-in-law trying to find someone at work to notify as they went through his cell phone records.

My older dog had a stroke over Easter weekend.  At the time it was happening, I had no idea what was going on and was almost certain we'd have to put him to sleep.  He has recovered, but still has some wobbliness when he walks.

The tooth that I had a root canal done on last year needed to be pulled last week when the gum in the vicinity started to swell.  It turned out to be a fractured root.

One thing that has kept me going has been my relationship with my girlfriend, with whom I've been together for just about three years, but even that has been subject to challenges. Our weekends without kids have been aligned so we've been able to have time to ourselves, but for the last month, her ex-husband has been cancelling out on his weekends, claiming he doesn't have enough money, so we haven't gotten to see each other for more than a couple hours at a time.

I haven't been living extravagantly. When I changed jobs at the beginning of 2013, I knew that I'd have to curb expenses, and I have done well keeping fixed costs down. But after taxes and support (still at the same level as my old job) take their bite, I'm living on about 46 % of my gross income. If you take into account that X has been asking me to pay for piano lessons for the past six months, it's probably less than that.

I hit an emotional trough by the beginning of April and arranged to get some counseling through my EAP, which provides six sessions. The counselor is having me try to come up with some activities I could participate in to get me out of the house. I've been looking over things to do at Meetup.com, but I haven't seen much that I could see myself doing.

I am pretty sure I am fighting depression, and it's affecting my ability to see how things could get better. Keynes wrote about the idea of animal spirits as a driving force in humans, the urge to do something rather than nothing, based on something other than rational calculation. To take risks, making leaps of faith toward the future, without dwelling on what could go wrong. My struggle is that my mind keeps seeing wrong turns and risks everywhere I look.

The constant loop of concerns wears me down, distracts from from focus, and leaves me feeling more helpless.  The term psychic entropy seems very fitting.

On the upside, I have been getting approached by recruiters who have been interested in whether I've been interested in making a change. If I could find a job that paid better and didn't require a death race to work, that might be the first step to getting past this horrible rut.

Second Guessing Tape Kicks into High Gear

I read the news today oh, boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
-- The Beatles, "A Day in the Life", Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol Records

On Thursday morning, the RSS feed of a local business news show made my draw drop. There was a press release about how my former employer, Company Line, had agreed to be acquired by THE Big Bad Database Company. Terms were undisclosed, but the story percolated all the way to the top of the food chain the tech and online marketing trade publications.

A good chunk of the day that followed involved me chatting online with some former Company Line coworkers with whom I keep in touch. A couple of them had exercised stock options upon their departure. The earlier hire was thinking he'd come out ahead by about 40 percent. The later hire was going to lose $0.50/share.

All of us were surprised by the news. To the best of our knowledge, the company had achieved little traction in the past year. A major product redesign went live early in the year, and I know that there had been a major build out of analytics infrastructure for tracking site traffic. I had also received reports of as a host of demo-driven-development features rolled out because the self-important product guy who came on board back in late spring 2011 had promised them to potential sales customers.

Indeed, in the acquisition press release, the three big-name clients they cited all had been subscribers for at least three years. The acquiring company isn't buying an existing or growing revenue stream. There were suggestions that the application will complement feature gaps in another marketing application that it acquired last year. It's also worth noting that the acquiring company is seeing stagnation in its existing markets and is playing catch-up in the world of cloud computing. This acquisition gives them some buzz and an air of seriousness about its strategy.

Still, the press, both locally and nationally, is touting this as a win. The spectre of self-doubt that likes to nag me in these moments reminds me that I left and chose to exercise none of my options. Although in retrospect the stress was wearing me down and making me more irritable in my latter days there, the spectre suggests that I didn't have what it took to get them across the goal line. Bowing out gracefully was the best I could hope for.

I have put myself out to pasture, doing largely maintenance programming with no real greenfield development in sight.

Nearly three quarters of the savings accumulated since the divorce have been swallowed up largely by repairs to the roof and some drain line work. Although my gross pay decreased by about $500/month (since 7/1, that gap has narrowed to just under $300), I continue to pay child support at the same level. I have a car payment now, and lots of costs have gone up. My sense of financial security is worsening. In my darker moments, I think the only options I have left at retirement are hitting the lottery and suicide.

This is what plays through my mind when I feel doubt. I know it's probably skewed. I try to remind myself of the saying "You cannot be replaced," but somehow it can't compete with the anti-mantra "You aren't that great. You've never been, and it's not going to get any better. Why try?"

I can't bring myself to commit any kind of self-harm. Not yet at least. But I am seriously lacking things to hope for. Things that make it worth getting out of bed in the morning. I don't trust the universe.

Seven Years Gone By... What's Next?

Seven years ago, I published my first post on this blog.  It was a heckuva ride for the first couple years.  I posted pretty faithfully, with posts being pretty lengthy, detailed pieces.  After I changed jobs and moved on to a post-marital life, this space became increasingly dormant.  If SiteMeter's counter stats are to be believed, most of my traffic are visits from Google's crawling software.

Lots of other blogs, which were displayed on this space's blogroll have since gone through similar changes.  Anais keeps chugging away at LiveJournal, and Digger will resurface every once in a while with an update.  Otherwise, the overriding majority of posters are like the illusory mathematicians and carpenters wives about whom Dylan wondered rhetorically in the final verse of "Tangled Up in Blue".  Yet still, I am on the road, looking for another joint.

So here is where things stand on my end...

I still make my home in the Circle City, living in the same house that I've lived in since Oct. 2000.  I'm also still very much involved in my daughters' lives.  They are now 10 and 8 years old.  The X keeps them booked on a pretty tight schedule during the school year.  Two of their scool nights are filled with dance classes.  During the competition season, that also includes an occasional Friday night.  On Wednesdays, they have piano lessons.  I work a early-shifted schedule that day, pick them up, and see them off to lessons and help with homework.  They stay with me on alternating weekends, and this summer, I have been taking vacation time to spend days with them. 

Both get pretty decent grades, As, Bs, and the occasional C, but my older daughter struggles with math and has trouble retaining concepts.  She loves to write stories and letters to her friends.  She also gets a kick out of drawing comic strips, but unfortunately, most of them are about bodily functions.  The younger is a lover of art and prolifically draws pictures that she keeps in binders.  I'm grateful that they've found creative outlets.  They're very much into pop music, much to my chagrin. :-)

As for me, I changed jobs shortly after the beginning of the year.  I accepted the offer with the Biggest Post-Secondary School in the State, which meant a pay cut.  Fortunately, I got high marks on a mid-year salary review and got a pay increase that restored a little over 40 percent of what I gave up making the leap.  Given the school's budgetary situation, I am very grateful for that. 

Working for a large organization like this has taken some getting adjusted to.  The pace is much slower, and you wind up getting locked into holding patterns while waiting for several divisions to reach agreement on where things should go next. 

I've been able to make some positive contributions, eliminating a big chunk of software development backlog, but all of that has been with bug fixing and extending some pretty dusty legacy applications written in the Perl programming language.  The next project I will be working on will be a mixture of Perl and newer code written in Python. 

Their project management and planning processes are in dire need of updating.  There is no infrastructure for deployment or automated testing.  Business analysts are basically order takers for project sponsors, rarely pushing back when sponsors or proxies overprescribe a solution.  The software that runs their mainline business functions does not have uniformly maintained environments for development, testing, and production, so it is commonplace for problems to be encountered when code gets promoted from one environment to the other.  Fortunately, there are some in leadership who want to modernize and have been willing to ask for my input on how to revamp things.  During my time at Company Line, I oversaw similar modernization efforts.

Living on the reduced pay has been a stressor for me.  I opted to keep my child support payments at the same level as what I was paying out under my old job.  About 35 percent of my net pay goes straight into the X's bank account, and I think she still gets paid more in child support than what she grosses with her current employer.  I've been cooking at home more, and eating out less.  I also take leftovers with me for lunch at work. 

Still, there have been some added challenges.  For one thing, on the Friday before I started my new job, I wrecked my car after hitting a patch of ice on a side street, so I started off the new year with a new car payment.  In February, the dentist decided that a crown that had been giving me problems since October of last year was in need of a root canal.  In March, a small part of my roof on my porch started to collapse due.  There was a lack of ice and water protection near the gutter and leakage over time resulted in rotting.  Insurance doesn't cover such things, so that repair work will require the replacement of the roof.  The price tag will be around $9,500.  I will be financing a little under a third of that because to do otherwise would basically wipe out the saving I have accumulated over the past five years.  I am praying that my air conditioning doesn't die this summer.

The recurring series of unfortunate events left me feeling some deep emotional lows.  I did see a counselor at the beginning of May through my employer's EAP.  He suggested I start doing freelance work on the side to supplement my income rather than trying to find a higher paying job.  I also went to the doctor to see about getting put back on antidepressants.  I went of venlafaxine for a month, but it resulted in anorgasmia.  Although my current employer is supposed to have great health coverage, I was being charged around $190, about six times what I was paying for venlafaxine at my old job at the same pharmacy (in network), and the cost of doctor visits went up about $30.  Yes, both plans were high-deductible.  The whole experience left me feeling that I can't afford to be treated for depression.  I have been doing my best to keep things together by trying to avoid negative thoughts.

On the relationship front, that is going pretty well.  I have been seeing her for a little over two years now.  We talked about blending families some at the beginning of the year, but the house issues  from March meant that I had less money for remodeling and expansion work.  We still see each other on the weekends where we don't have our kids, and I come over to her house for dinner once a week, usually on Tuesdays.  I took my first out-of-town vacation in over seven years about a month ago, joining her and her family at a rented cabin down by the river that forms the southern border of the state.  She is struggling financially, too.  Back in September, she took a job that is more in line with a postgraduate degree she has been pursuing, but there was a pay cut involved, so I know she has been stressed over that.

That's about all I can think of for now.  If you have additional questions about what's been going on, let me know in the comment section.

Late Night Listening XLII: Take Five (Years)

The title for this post is inspired by Dave Brubeck, whose passing last week gave jazz lovers reason to pause and reflect the richness of his life's work.  It's probably cliche to express a fondness of "Take Five", but I especially love this recording, which sets the tune to lyrics.

If you click around the 2007-era post archives on this blog, you'll turn up a lot of agonizing about a lengthy and stressful job search, which wrapped up at the end of that year.

The year 2012 has seen a similar search, playing itself out over the course of a year, but not the national scale.  Almost all of my job prospects have been local to the Circle City, with the few national ones being those which had telecommute options.

The motivation for moving on started out as a growing dissatisfaction with the job, as the product veep started to grate on my nerves more and more.  But as the year drew near to an end, it became more and more apparent that the company's future was becoming ever so more cloudy.
 
At this late hour, I have my eighth job offer of the year on the table.  I also had my share of rejections (five to be exact).  Most of them stemmed from lack of familiarity with a particular language or technology and an unwillingness to take a chance on me assaulting the learning curve.

The present offer was extended formally to me this past Thursday evening, with a request that I make a decision by this Tuesday, and I have been at levels of anxiety that I haven't experienced for some time.  I've bought some time by sending a list of clarifying questions to the hiring manager, and he as responded by asking me to come up to the office for another visit.

All and all, unless I see some serious red flags during my visit, I will accept the offer, but I want to make sure I don't hate myself in the process.

So where did the other seven offers come from.  I'll itemize:

1. Subscription-Based Online Business Reputation Listing of Angela -- originally applied for engineering position for search; offered me lesser development role involving more generic website development; offer extended in Feb.; increased pay by 2 %.
2. Big Pharma Marketing Collateral Warehouse Fulfillment -- suggested by local recruiter; would have involved Java MVC framework development with dysfunctional source code tree and hosting on a mainframe; offer extended in Feb.; increased pay by 2 %
3. Education Employment Screening System -- applied for senior engineering role; somewhat shaky operation with production servers hosted in their building's basement and strange Java/SQL Server architecture; offer extended in Feb.; decreased pay by 5.3 %
4. Local For-Profit Professional and Trade School -- suggested by recruiter; school spent $2 M on outsourced development in China for custom built social network; brought in-house in desperate need of scalability; offer extended in late June; maintained same pay
5. Bean Crock 24-Hour Restaurants --  suggested by recruiter; restaurant chain needed a senior level developer to come in and bring code base and build process under control; turned down job before they could give me a salary
6. Consulting Firm for Big New England Insurance Co. -- suggested by recruiter; would have been contracted to contractor; enterprisey development team built newfangled insurance quoting site without good knowledge of JavaScript; needed JavaScript debugger; offer extended in late Oct.; 16-percent annual increase in pay
7. Red Diamond that Does "Great Things" Seed and Pesticides -- suggested by recruiter; would have been a 6-month contract to help a biostatistician build a web interface around some statistical analysis code that would help them make decisions on where to funnel R&D dollars; offer extended in early Nov.; 6 percent annual increase in pay
8. Biggest Public Post-Secondary School in the State -- responded to ad; surprisingly progressive IT team looking to bring mature and effective development and operations people maintain legacy apps of ill repute and develop new apps using open source technology stack; 6 percent decrease in pay but awesome health insurance, retirement savings plan, and vacation time policy

Yep.   That's right.  Tons of effort to find a job only to wind up taking the one with the biggest pay cut.  That's the biggest part of my ambivalence towards accepting the offer.  In the long run, the benefits may turn out to be a better deal, but giving up $500 gross per month is a tough one to digest.

Of secondary concern is that the job would require the return to a car-based commute.  With my current job, I've been riding the bus into work for the most part.  The only days I've driven have been situations where I needed to be somewhere, and taking the bus to get there would have been impractical or would have required me leaving too early since the service is hourly.

I won't be driving as far as I was driving for my job that I held from 2005 - 2007 (19 miles versus 25), but it will be to the northeast side of the metro area, passing through two or three traffic choke points.  That means more stress from the drive, more costs on fuel, and the possibility that I'll finally have to ditch my 2000 Saturn L Series which has like 168,000+ miles on it.

Finally, I will most likely be giving up my flexibility in hours.  One of the things that has kept me tied to my current job for so long is the fact that I do have the ability to shift my hours as long as I am getting stuff done.  That means that I can take off work at 3 pm on Wednesdays to pick up my kids from the bus after school and take them to their piano lessons, if I have to.

On the bright side, even if this is an academic institution, their leadership seems to be heading in a more forward-thinking direction, and I will continue to work on an open source technology stack and get a crack at doing some bleeding edge technology stuff as well.

Moreover, of all the potential employers, this is the only one where I didn't feel like I would need to take a shower at the end of the day because I felt like I was doing something either shady or evil.  Since this is a vocational and technical school, my work would be helping people get an education that would open new doors, rather than shifting wealth towards the already wealthy.

I can probably  make it through the pay cut.  It will require eating in more and being more stringent about not saying "Yes" to every expenditure that X asks for.  There is a chance I could also supplement some of that lost income through freelance work, but that would be new territory and I don't know if I have a deep enough rolodex.

Late Night Listening XLI: Are You on Fire?

There's something about the season... the shortening of days, the changing of clocks, or perhaps the contentiousness of the nation's political Zeitgeist... that works to stir up my existential angst. But when you throw in an Indigo Girls concert, that kicks things up to crisis level.

This past Friday, these talented souls put on an amazing show in a college town southeast of here. I had purchased the tickets back in mid-July when my Beloved had heard they were scheduled to play there. It was my first time seeing both of them live. This past May, I had seen Amy perform solo at a snug local venue and was similarly blown away.

I remember being hooked on them after seeing the video "Closer to Fine" on Mtv back in the early fall of 1988. I hadn't even turned 20 yet, but the song's yearning to transcend the confusion of living spoke to me strongly. Their harmonies, unlike anything else in the mainstream, lured me in.

I was in my second year of college, struggling mightily with organic chemistry, worried horribly about a grandmother who had endured a horrible accident that would leave her an invalid for another 16 years, and still stuck in an estrangement from my father that had lasted for almost four years.

Unfortunately, it was also a time of limited budgets, so I didn't invest in a copy of that album. The song would wander in and out of my mind over the years, but for the most part, I didn't follow their prolific career.

When I moved to the Circle City in 2000, I started listening to an indie rock station here, which would play newer tracks from them. In 2005, I borrowed a copy of Retrospective and it gave me a chance to sample their work in the years between.

My Beloved, by contrast, is a huge fan and has followed them throughout the years, and has been to multiple concerts. I smiled as I would occasionally glance over to watch her singing along to her favorites.

The performance on Friday was interesting from the standpoint that their opening act, the Shadowboxers, doubled as a backup band, a group of young guys who have some killer harmonies in their own right.

The show had many moments that touched me, but the most powerful performance was their rendition of "Kid Fears". Amy and Emily started off alone, and toward the end, a member of the Shadowboxers comes on stage to sing the male vocals. The emotions the song tapped in side of me have left my mind playing that part of the concert over and over.

The overall state of my life is difficult to describe, and there are probably changes on the horizon, but I can't quite puzzle out what form it take. My employer, Company Line, is probably reaching a point where it is time to pull the plug. Despite revamps in the product and efforts to create a more effective sales program, the traction hasn't been there.

After having been there for almost five years and seeing a lot of people come and go, and having seen my closest coworker been dismissed ungracefully after she burnt out, I have struggled most days to get of out bed and get to the office.

I've done some job searching over the summer and fall. I have been presented with three more offers, and I've turned them all down because they were not natural steps of growth or not good cultural fits.

Amid all of the work uncertainty, my relationship with my Beloved keeps me going. The loneliness and isolation I've struggled with in the past has become a distant memory, and I've been spending way less time living inside my head when dealing with problems, which is why I haven't felt the need to post to my blog for a while.

We've been together almost 1 1/2 years, and the emotional bonds have grown stronger. And much to my surprise, both her kids and mine have been very comfortable with us, although we do get some ribbing over displays of affection. We're still a ways away from merging households, but it has become an ever increasing reality with the passage of time.

Although there are many planes in our connectedness, music is perhaps the strongest one, and we have had countless conversations over what we love most and what it means to us.

Perhaps some of the emotional heaviness I experienced at last Friday's show was an elevated awareness of the time that has passed over the past two-plus decades of my adult life and the sorrow that so many of those years were spent without knowing her, or even knowing of her existence.

Sometimes, I catch myself wondering if things would have been better if we would have crossed paths at a much earlier point in our lives. My Beloved puts it into perspective by saying we met at the right time in our lives, when we were ready for each other, shaped by the bumps and scrapes of living life.

Although that ascribe to the Universe a level of grand design that I don't quite buy into, she's probably right in the sense that we are who we are now because of the things we lived through, and that to think that we could have lived for the better by meeting earlier on would be foolish because at that stage of our lives, we were very different people.

When I hear this, I know she is right. To meet her at this stage of my life couldn't be a better time, for there is still plenty life to be lived, and everything leading up to this point has made me realize just how rare this kind of sustained connectedness can be.