Tag: anxiety

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Well Isn’t That Novel (Coronavirus 2019)

It was cooler and rainy today. Without any projects, I spent all day installing VPN plugins in case the high school staff needed to work from home due to the impending pandemic. I don’t know if this disease is any worse than usual, but I certainly don’t remember anything like this happening in the past. It could just seem worse because we’re so connected with the rest of the world these days.

Zach really wanted Brangus for lunch, so he, Gary, Greg, and I met Josh there to eat. I didn’t think it was anything special today, but it was nice eating a bit more food again.  Afterward, I ran around the high school some more, waiting to hear if they would shut down next week. So many other things have. The entire district has been printing packets of schoolwork in case the kids have to do some learning from home. We normally print around 50,000 pages a day in the district, but today we were up over 250,000 by the time I left.

I got home and waited for Summer to get off work so I could meet her at Planet Fitness. I thought maybe going to the gym together would make up for some of the time we lose in the evenings now that she works so late. She put me on a bike next to an arc machine for her, and we did about 30 minutes of that. I was really hoping to be able to talk more, but she was so focused on her workout that I felt like a distraction. Nobody in the place really spoke at all, so I just felt awkward for that on top of already feeling awkward just existing there. The bike was doable with some pain in my right knee, but when she took me to the weights I absolutely hated everything about it. She skipped that after a couple reps and took me back to look at the stretch station, but we ended up doing just a few minutes on a couple treadmills instead. She ended up having to cut it short, and I just decided to split.

On the way out, an immense feeling of sadness washed over me for some reason. I didn’t really understand why, but I suspected it was some combination of the weather, the emotionally trying week, and being exhausted from the roughly eight hours of sleep I’d had since Monday. I went home and laid down for a while before having a long bath and then heading to bed late again.

Maybe I’m only introverted here.

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Finding Value

I laid in bed for a couple hours but didn’t sleep a wink. The sound of thunderstorms echoed from my Google Home speakers just as the storm raged behind my eyelids; synapses firing constantly with every burning question and emotion. I could feel my eyes darting back and forth, jittering at lightning speed. Frustrated, I eventually just got up and played more Overwatch to try and occupy my mind. I figured there was no sense in burning cycles trying to understand a truth that wasn’t my own. The only thing I could possibly do was make assumptions, which would only serve to bounce around in my head forever, wasting even more time. I could never really know Summer’s truth, because she would say one thing and feel another.

Eventually I got out with the sun and went to retrieve those things – those bigger things that I had brought over for my family. Being financially-minded, I tried to provide nice things so that Summer could focus on paying down her debts instead. I never did get to actually witness that looming mountain of debt. I only heard stories, as though it was a fictional giant in some kind of fairytale. I just wanted to make sure my family had more than we needed. I thought that actually providing for the family was speaking louder than any words I could possibly muster, but Summer found no value at all in what I provided. If words were all she really wanted, then I accepted the trade and wrote letters to take the place of things I took back. It was over a couple grand worth of just stuff around the house, not to mention the thousands of more dollars invested in things for our family to do, like season passes to Magic Springs, a family set of bicycles, a kayak, a motorcycle, or my own family’s reservation for another hotel room on our planned trip to Eureka Springs in two weeks. Neither one of our houses could even contain it all, so it remained split.

Wanting to know the truth is what drove me mad in the past. I could never understand what motivated Sarah to treat me the way she did. I could only assume it was for her own benefit, either as emotional support, or some kind of backup plan in case something else went sideways. Summer never seemed particularly motivated. She expressed that she only wanted to do things to please me, constantly. She wanted to tell me nice things and do things for me, but she would never accept that I simply loved her the way she was. She projected how she wanted to be treated onto me, and could never see past that singular vision. Conversely, she seemingly wanted to change who I was from the start. Surely, she helped me regain some of what I had lost, but she would never accept me for who I was. She said that she did, but then acted differently, or got upset when I didn’t change enough for her liking.

In the end of it all, it certainly feels as though she was just looking for a reason to leave, or at least looking to see where else she could go. Fussing over who texted who first in the day felt petty. Saying she had to force herself not to text me first just to see if I would text her was passive-aggressive at best. Saying that by not giving holiday gifts I made her feel guilty was completely contrived after tabulating how much money I had spent on her and the kids over the course of our relationship. I always told her that if she didn’t want to be with me, she didn’t have to make an excuse. She could just not be. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her, but rather that I knew I couldn’t really make her feel any kind of way about me. We had to meet in the middle, and all this time I thought we had been.

Even before we dated, I told her that girls tend to jump from relationship to relationship with relative ease, and that guys tend to fall harder than girls. We both fell into stereotypes, and couldn’t communicate effectively enough to break that barrier. Communication is a two-way street though, and she refused any suggestions of counseling to work through her own grief from the past. I would have done anything to help us communicate better, but she outright refused at every single turn. In the end, I have to accept that there are things I can do, and things that I cannot.

I ended the day with a walk to Allen’s house where we did a lot of man-hugging. He gets a little too woman-hatey to be honest, but he’s always there for me as a pillar of support. I certainly did not rebound to some mystery woman that wanted to help me grow stronger, and after two days of spilling my guts, I kind of feel like I’m just screaming at a wall expecting it to budge.

Maybe the only way to move on is to just forget.

And maybe we’ll try sobriety again tomorrow.

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Dear Summer,

I envy that in all of your own troubles and pain and suffering, you managed to hold on to what I had lost so long ago in my own years-long wars. You seemed to earnestly believe that you could fall in love with prince charming and have everything fall into place so perfectly, and you fawned over me more than any person ever should. In that fantasy, you sometimes had trouble making things work in a practical sense, but your struggles appeared to be my strengths. For years upon years when all I wanted to do was die, focusing on practicality and making the day-to-day work was what kept me alive. Ultimately I felt like your emotional strength and devotion met with my practicality and wit, allowing us to grow stronger together, into a proper, functional family. What you felt was weakness in our differences, I perceived as strength in the breadth of our combined skillset.

It’s no secret that cynicism and sarcasm are my strongest and most prevalent defense mechanisms. I’m not so bad, after all, if everything else is awful too. I seldom speak those things as true and honest feelings, though I understand how someone could take them to heart. I doth joke too hard and too negatively, but it keeps me sane, I think. There are three truths to every situation: your truth, my truth, and the actual truth. Neither of us can ever truly know the truth apart from our own without some trust in the other, so I’m afraid I’ll never really understand the causality. Did my cynicism truly drive you away from me? Or were we never meant to last, and my darkened heart proved itself yet again in protecting me from further harm? After years of struggling with a very real addiction to Sarah and her emotional manipulation, I was left broken in so many ways. Not all of those wounds healed completely, and even if they did heal, you might not recognize them for all the calluses. I knew that I would never survive another trip through that level of darkness, and so in order to protect myself and my own family from what I understood as my own ultimate demise, I found strength where I could. I survived tonight because of how jaded my relationship with Sarah made me. And just like that, somehow I’ve credited that wretch for saving my life.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, unless you’re just left paralyzed, in which case everything pretty much just sucks. I would rather the end of our relationship be an inevitability, and credit my dark humor for saving me, than accept the thought that I drove you away with my own misgivings. I couldn’t let you into my heart quickly enough because I was terrified of exactly what happened tonight. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I wholly trusted a “completely innocent” interaction and later learned it to be the complete opposite. It’s literally my greatest fear in a relationship, and you knew this. Finding you having dinner at Umami with that guy brought me right back to ground zero, and I have to say I handled it like a goddamn champ. I didn’t want to revert back to that suspicious, jealous me that I had given up eight years ago, but there we were. Even if it was completely innocent to you, and you just needed a friend, it should absolutely NEVER have been some random guy you know through work that I’ve never even heard of. If it had been a male friend like Alex that you had known for years, I would have 1,000% understood. As it was, I knew that you had already made up your mind that I was old news, and it was obvious because that motherfucker ghosted you AS SOON AS HE SAW MY FACE. Even if you play naive again, he knew exactly what he was getting into, and for that, shame on him.

I never thought I’d be saying, “goodbye,” forever, but I think that is because I am an idiot. They told me actions speak louder than words, so I physically put myself into your home to make it our home, and my own house became a very strange place for me. Regardless of what idiocies came from my mouth, I continually tried to put myself where it really counted. It was hard and overwhelming a lot of the time, but I kept coming back because I thought it was worth the steep learning curve. Ultimately I guess you had bigger fish to fry. At least I was honest from the beginning when I asked if you were looking for Mr. Third-Time’s-a-Charm. I don’t need superficial symbols because I show my devotion with actual honesty, presence, and inclusion in family, and I expect my partner to respect me and mine well enough to verbally decline unwanted advances. It’s a pity you didn’t really want to be a part of mine, because they’re a pretty great family most of the time.

You can’t expect your boiled-over, emotional diatribes to function as productive adult conversations. I was very honest in that I knew I had a lot of growing to do. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle for me, and I thought that I had adequately expressed that to you as well. I suppose I could have done more to initiate the conversations, but who has the time when you’re busy parenting teenagers. Blame whatever you want, but at the end of the day you have to learn how to express what you’re feeling in some kind of meaningful way. You can’t outwardly express that everything is perfect and expect your partner to accept that with eager arms, then get upset over all of the combined little things. You literally went from “I would marry you tomorrow” to “dinner with schmuck” in a week’s time, and so for that reason, I’m out.

I just want someone to scratch my head for a while and tell me I’m not so irrevocably broken that I can’t maintain a real, adult relationship ever again.

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Prime Age

It was cool enough this morning that I didn’t want to ride in to work again, but it didn’t take long for the sun to come out and make me regret it. I spent pretty much all day messing with 1:1 laptops, so I found myself tired, bored, and generally wanting to hang myself.

Allen was still craving KFC, but I convinced him and a bunch of others to ride with me to Brown’s Catfish for my birthday meal. I don’t know why everyone’s too bashful to actually accumulate rewards points, but I only got four bucks worth myself after my discount.

After lunch was more of the same, and I just wanted to leave more than anything else. Eventually I did, and instead of taking advantage of the day, I just went home and played some Overwatch until Summer got home. Then I stopped by Arby’s to use another birthday coupon to get her some food on the way up. I ran into Scott and Jodi there, and I hadn’t seen them in forever. I felt a little awkward just because my brain was tired. I had already started to wind down from interacting with people for the day, so I had a hard time forming small talk.

When I got to Summer’s, everyone had already wound down for the day. Summer had a rough one, so she was pretty much done for the evening. We watched what was left of her baking show, and then everyone went to bed.

Hopefully only halfway through the primes.

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Unexpectations

Today was full of little surprises. I arrived at work to an open front-row parking space in the light rain. Then one of my first work orders took me to Neal’s room across the building, and he started a conversation with me about motorcycles that lasted through most of the advisory period. I gave him my number, hoping to make a new riding buddy out of it. When I stopped by the library, Karen gave me the pieces of laptop that our superintendent had jogged by a week or so ago, and said he had the police go back out to find it after he learned we were paying for accidental damage coverage. When lunch time eventually rolled around, Allen talked Gary into joining us at KFC, and he said he actually really liked what he ordered.

I spent the afternoon working lightly on a few different things I’d had sitting around. I dug around a bit in group policy, poked at the 1:1 laptops, and made a couple deployments. At one point, I spent a little time on the phone with Ronda and Jessica, and then later with Lenovo to ask about their depot procedures. It all went by pretty quickly, and then I headed home in the cold.

Summer said Autumn had a midwinter concert, and I wanted to try and attend this time, so I decompressed in Overwatch for a bit until it was time to get ready. I dressed up a bit and met her at the Center, along with her parents. There was a symphonic band for each grade, and then one band of mixed misfits, so we had to wait until Autumn played last. Some of the songs sounded like they gave everyone the same music to play, but I felt like they had performed better in the past. I just kept flashing back to Ratzlaff spraying everyone in the first three rows, yelling at them to be better. I don’t know what it’s like now, but it feels like it’s lost some heart.

When I got home, I put together my new carpet cleaner and internalized the entire user’s manual while pingponging a chat with Summer. I hoped to end the night with a little more Overwatch before bed, but I ran out of time.

Through all of the shadowy corners of me.

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Deep Diving

I didn’t really have anything new come in today, so I got to spend my time working on some older work. I started at the arena messing with one of their Crestron iPads. Then I tinkered around in Group Policy for a while because I couldn’t figure out why a printer wouldn’t deploy properly. I ended up heading back to the shop, but lunchtime snuck up on me. Gary and Heather were going to Taco Villa, so I tagged along and we brought food back to the shop. Then Gary helped me pick through my Group Policy issue. It all came down to a rogue space in the share name of the device.

Back at the high school, I finally got the Crestron app working after receiving a call back from our vendor. Then I ended the day setting up a bunch of computers in the field house. Autumn and her friend were at the high school for the Harlem Globetrotters, but Summer came to get them and I just went home.

Dad and I talked a bit more about my clogged drain pipe this morning, so I dug out an old, long piece of aluminum to shove down the hole. I poured some more boiling water down the hole to fill it up, and then shoved the stick down as far as I could go. It bent around the angled pipe almost perfectly, and I managed to clear the drain. I still wasn’t sure if there were any roots inside it, and the closet flange was still offset on the pipe, so I left it for another day. I ran by Lowe’s to check out some parts to fix it, and to pick up a windchime on clearance.

Heather had told me during lunch that the Globetrotters event was free for employees, so I tried going out there to check it out. There was a huge line of people, and none of the other employees I talked to knew anything about it being free or even discounted. I wasn’t even aware that it was a charity event, so that made me feel even less good about trying to get in. I ended up going home and doing more research on toilet repairs until bedtime.

Still not hard. Just gross.

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Black Holiday

I took a personal day to hang out with Eaddie since school was out for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Summer had to work. It was quiet when I got up, so I had a pancake and started watching Luke Cage. Ronda messaged me on Marco Polo to say that Long John Silver’s had a for-lease sign up, which made me pretty sad. When Eaddie eventually came out of her room, she watched a bit of TV with me. She didn’t want to leave the house at all, so I left her to her chores while I went home to shower.

I hadn’t been there in a while, so the inside temperature had actually dropped super low. I had to give it some time to warm up before I could do much of anything. Eventually I had my bath and then had to head back out for dinner. I decided to make shredded beef street tacos with chipotles in adobo sauce so we could eat the aging cilantro and sour cream in the fridge.

I got everything loaded into the Instant Pot and sat down to a couple more episodes of Luke Cage while we waited for Summer to get home. Autumn was dropped off with McDonald’s for her and Eaddie, which aggravated me beyond having the already super late dinner. I thought the tacos were pretty good, but I forgot to get the veggie mix out of the fridge again for some reason.

I hate that this whole weekend was just another bust. It was a long one, too.

This is worse than a lack of motivation.

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I’m not kidding! Why do they always think I’m kidding???

The middle school started ACT Aspire testing this morning, and I drew the short stick. I burned the entire morning sitting in Sara’s office, and only got called out twice – both times to unlock a door in the counselors’ room because someone forgot their key. At one point, Robin brought the counselors to talk to me about trying to get their campus to a 1:1 device ratio so they could test all the kids at once. I vehemently replied that we should instead be reducing the device count, and that testing everyone at once is a very bad idea. I’m still surprised when people are shocked to hear me say as much.

Nobody wanted to join me at Ruby Tuesday for another $5 salad bar, so I went by myself and just sat at the bar. It was a quick and quiet lunch, but not inside my head. A group of employees were mingling at the other end of the bar talking mad trash about how people had been coming in all day asking for John. John’s served my tables many times in the past. He is far and away one of the best servers I’ve ever had at any restaurant. He’s always courteous, professional, prompt, and most importantly conscious of what’s happening at the table. Even today, he stopped by to say hello, commenting that I wasn’t with my usual posse. Never once has he even suggested that we should ask for him by name, and I honestly don’t feel like that has anything to do with why people do so. If any of those employees spent half as much time hustling as leaning, maybe they’d have eager repeat customers.

After lunch, Allen drove me out to London so I could show him that he didn’t properly re-enroll a Chromebox after powerwashing it. I figured I had already burned half a day, so I might as well get a trip out of it. When we got back, I spent a little time at the shop before heading to the high school. I got a very little bit done. My Adobe form was printing unpredictably.

My evening flew by as usual. I went home for a little while before going to Walmart for some things. I needed cat food, and wanted to peruse for a while without someone nagging about it. It’s funny, because I used to always want someone to go with me, but oftentimes now it’s more peaceful just to go alone at my own pace. I picked up some cold fried chicken on a whim in case anyone was hungry, and headed up to Summer’s.

We ended the evening with some more Glee. There’s just something about that show that completely sucks me in emotionally.

So blame it on my ADD, baby.

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Form Over Function

Today went by really fast. I spent a ton of time editing a PDF form so I can print on top of my depot service paperwork, because I didn’t want to waste a whole sheet of paper for every repair the way Dale did before. It felt mostly pointless in the grand scheme of things, but it made me feel better until I realized how much of my life is wasted in moments like that.

Allen texted me for lunch, so I convinced him to try Linh so I could get some hot soup on a cold day. I actually finished my whole bowl, and he liked his spicy, saucy, fried chicken thing. I stopped by the house on the way back so I could put some packages inside. Then the afternoon was more or less wasted as well. Time has been getting away from me in a bad way.

When I got home, I did a full panel of tests on my shrimp tank’s water chemistry. After months of neglect, the parameters are still great. I’ve got a ton of algae that I can’t seem to control, and the worms have exploded as well. The plants I was growing really well have started to wither away a bit, and I’m not sure why. I may have to start dosing fertilizers.

Finally, my first laptop repair has been shipped off.

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Gettin’ Weepy

The girls had all region today, so I got up alone and had some salad for breakfast before heading home to clean up. I had to get Aimee’s laptop from the high school to her at the junior high, and ended up sitting and chatting with her for quite a while. By the time I left there, Summer had already left the concession stand, so I left and stopped by Ridgewood Brothers to pick up some smoked turkey. I must have clicked something on the iPad that made it not charge my credit card, so when I got back to the car and realized it, I ran back to pay Robert and he handed me a side of slaw to go with it.

I ate a little when I got home, then cleaned the vacuum cleaner so I could clean up the bedroom a bit. There’s still a ton of junk in there to sort through and discard, but at this rate that will always be the case. Eventually Summer got everyone home, so I went to pick her and Autumn up so we could go to Walmart. I volunteered to make burgers and Autumn wanted to pick up some snacks for Eaddie and herself while Summer and I were out with friends.

We dropped Autumn off and gathered everything up to head to John and Melissa’s. Travis was already there, and Veronica and her kids showed up a bit after that. We had a great time eating and drinking, and then tried to play some Magic: The Gathering until we gave up on teaching three new players and switching to Cards Against Humanity. Asher had brought it and wanted to play, but we refused until he could beat Travis at Magic. The kids ended up leaving to go to an escape room anyway, which made it all the more funny when they returned to us playing their game.

By the end of the night, Travis had gotten pretty weepy about everything, so we tried to sober him up enough just for us to take him home. As I walked him into his house, he seemed very concerned about the Dust from His Dark Materials. I did my best to reassure him, and locked him in his house so I could get home with Summer for some sleep.

I AM THE DARKNESS! I AM THE ONE WHO DUSTS!