I’m aware that I’m censoring myself for so many reasons. Like most anyone who writes about their life and publishes that online with very little, if any, barriers to reading it, I struggle with where to draw the line. Lately, I’ve drawn that line farther and farther from myself, for reasons I both do and don’t understand. [Did I freak out a bit when I heard out-of-context discussion of things that I'd written about on another Weblog? Yes, yes I did. Nothing ever came of it, though.]

Also, let’s just put it this way: November starts my fourth month of working proposals at the office. Solid. My output of non-work things was great early in that run—for example, I was driving to Nashville every Tuesday, bootlegging concerts, and getting them up in under a week—but that’s radically curtailed now. It probably hasn’t helped that church responsibilities have ramped up, as chancel choir has been doing a lot of things—fundraisers, extra practices, etc.—that have just left me with not a lot of “me” time if I don’t cut out activities. Two examples: at the beginning of October, I started a “When’s your birthday?” topic on the mailing list of our local friends, and here it’s November and I haven’t compiled anything. Sad. Sadder still, I have a concert bootleg from mid-September that I’ve done nothing with [to say nothing of two more shows since then, and ... I can only remember what the latter show was. Really. I can't remember the show before that clearly].

I want to say that things are bad, but they’re really pretty good. All the work stuff has been hard but very rewarding. As my boss noted yesterday, I could print out the corporate annual report when it comes out and point to items that I actually had a hand in bringing about. Ummm … awesome! I’ve been very blessed to have had all the opportunities that I’ve had lately, even when they’ve left me very, very beaten down.

But I think what’s messing with my head this week is that one of my mentors recently had a health scare, one the doctors are still working to figure out but one which would be easily expected to be stress-related. My mentor is fine and back at the office now, but … I won’t lie, it’s freaked me out. I’m far more concerned about them than myself, but I will admit to concern on my end. I know myself and my family enough to know that, while we’re darn talkative, we still tend to bottle up all the truly stressful things and hold them fast to us as if they’re comforting.

So if you run into me and get the thousand-yard stare, grab me by the shoulder and shake me back, would you? I find myself going into that state a lot.

The end of all this is coming by the end of the year, and the responsibilities will just shift around in different ways, for sure. I’m telling myself that it’s growth, and that growth is hard. It’s worth it, though.

[I started this with the hopes that it would help, but I've intentionally put up so many fences of vagueness that I'm not sure if it has.]

Okay, so I look at my pathetic progress on my 2006 New Year’s Resolutions and weep. But that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do something about it.

What am I doing? Well, after reading that weekday TV and video gaming seems to lower students’ educational endeavors, I got to thinking: what do I do at night when I get home from work? Well, I usually sit down, watch ABC World News Tonight, then sit down to scarf down whatever my TiVos have recorded for me. That sucking sound you hear is any chance that I will get much done going out the window.

Now, I get a fair amount done at night on the things I choose to work on, but the things that I choose to work on are not really the things that I’d value—reading more, especially my Bible in preparation for teaching Sunday school classes, maybe a little programming, Web work, etc. Instead, I half-watch TV while I piddle aimlessly on the Internet. It’s … bad.

So, I’ve decided that, for the month of October, I’ll timeshift all my non-news TV watching to the weekend, when I really don’t have much concern in the way of goofing off. That’ll add a few hours each night not spent wondering what TiVo has for me and maybe I’ll, you know, clean my office, or work on some bookcases, or any of the number of reasonable projects I could knock out…

Seven years ago today, I in-processed as a new employee. As this entry becomes public, I’m in a conference room about 30 yards from where I started on that fine August day, but instead of first-day work jitters, I have first-pitch-as-proposal-manager jitters. This has been my life this week, but it has been worth it.

If you’d told me seven years ago that I’d have “manager” next to my name in any way, shape, or form, I would have laughed at you. [I might have laughed at you two years ago on this date as well.]

I have been blessed: with opportunities, with support, with mentoring. The people who were a large part of my decision in continuing employment here after graduation continue to make that happen now.

Let’s win, baby.

There come times in most everyone’s career—well, at least for those of us who have careers where we stay in one field, anyway—where things change, for the good and the bad. [Insert hokey observation about the kanji for "crisis" being a superimposition of "danger" and "opportunity" here.] Often times, you don’t recognize these signposts until they’ve passed; sometimes, though, they come with huge neon acoutrements, blinding you with the message, “Don’t screw this up, kid!”

I believe that I pulled up to such a sign today. Now: which way will I turn?

[Yeah, I'm hopelessly vague here because I don't wanna get dooced. You may feel free to call/email/flag me down/invite me over for dinner.]

I forget where I first ran across the concept, but when I heard about it, I not only agreed with it, I was definitely very much practicing it: having a personal board of directors. What’s that? Think of yourself as a corporation: you have stakeholders in your life, sure, but there are people that you know that, for some reason, you respect as role models or wise counsels in different facets of your life. [Please note that when I discuss role models, I certainly mean to refer you to my previous statement here on role models.] The concept of a personal board of directors shifts that concept a bit further down the line: these are the folks whose counsel that you seek again and again on a variety of subjects.

Just as with a corporation, your board is going to change: sometimes, you change jobs, so you’ll lose regular contact with the workplace mentors—folks in and out of your direct-reporting architecture—with the folks whom you keep in your circle. [If I sit down and think about the people I have on my own board from my workplace, only one is in my direct-report organization---my boss. Everyone else is either someone who has left the company or, oddly enough, works in our Quality organization. Dad must be proud of that. ] Just as with other relationships, friends who were close to you at one stage of life aren’t later on, and your lack of contact sees you relying on them far less. [The reverse, of course, is true; sometimes you find that new friends are people whom you quickly put in a position of trust.] And then, if you’re me, one of your old role models ends up shattering all that.

The key, as with any kind of investment, is diversification. Have people near and far in whom you place trust. Have directors in various facets of your life. Mine fall in various places: my parents, good friends of mine here in town, colleagues present and past, folks from various church organizations of which I’ve been a part over the years, and partners in crime. These are people whom you should be able to name when you stop to think about it, but stopping to think about it is important. What should you ask yourself? “Is this a person whom I want having a say in the direction of my life?” is quite a fair question, one you’ll ask with friends and family likely most often. Now, I love my parents and have a very good relationship with them, but not everyone is blessed with parents like my brother and I have. Some folks are going to be taking their parents’ counsel when it’s simply not worth it, and that’s sad but something you need to get away from. Additionally, you’ll have some friends whom you realize you’re hitting up for advice again and again, but then come to realize that, hey, that’s a bad idea.

What’s another good question to ask? “Do I have enough people from all facets of my life?” If you have people in your career in whom you place no trust, you probably are not really all that invested in your career, and you need to think about changing careers. One person—whom I won’t name—where our relationship is definitely that we’re mutual directors for each other as much admitted to me a while back that he didn’t have this, and it’s one reason that he’s looking hard at a career change. It’s a change that I support, even though I have given him a lot of grief about it in the past.

And that’s another thing: do your directors always tell you what you want to hear? If so, you’re probably not getting good advice. You should be troubled and frustrated from time to time when you see the counsel of people that are important to you, because sometimes, you’re doing things totally wrong and that person will have the perspective to say, “Hey, wake up!’ My aforementioned friend approached me about his career change and felt like I’d long been one of the people holding him back on such a thing; I told him that the previous advice I’d given him was because I didn’t feel like he was committed to the prospect of change in the past, so I was being fundamentally conservative with my advice.

If you’re reading this and can name a group of people—on two hands!—in whom you have placed trust and respect, keep on doing that. Having more than ten folks is probably unwieldy and likely has strong overlapping anyway. Having too few folks means that you’re probably not getting enough diverse advice in your life. If you don’t have enough, intentionally seek out mentors in your life—find people who are doing what you’re doing or what you want to do and ask for advice. Talk to them about your situation. You’ll see where that leads you. If you don’t invest in your friends and family, start! Nobody’s got it all together, and we can all stand to hear from folks about our direction in life.

Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.

– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son, January 29, 1748

РFran̤ois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections, maxim 378

Communication Skills: Rating 5.0 / 5.0

Presents ideas effectively and conveys thoughts clearly and concisely. Communicates well in writing.

Communication Skills: Geof does a great deal of work outside of TBE in the areas of announcing and reporting. These interests and talents have provided him outlets to sharpen his ability to effectively convey wrtten and verbal thoughts clearly and concisely. It is my experience that gifted engineers and technical professions rarely have exceptional communication skills. Geof’s communication skills are well respected on our team as he often called upon to edit charts, documents, memos and emails

[Please note that the errors above aren't mine. I joked with my boss that he was probably pissed that I couldn't review all his employee evals. He nodded, laughed, and walked out of my office.]

I do a lot of wacky stuff outside of my engineering nerddom: broadcasting hockey, hockey public address [hopefully more of that next season], Web stuff, etc. Writing and communicating is what I probably do best. Dr. Szilagyi was right: I would have made a great English major. [And if you're reading that, shaking your head, and parsing my grammar: remember, I wasn't one.]

The funniest bit of non-managerial praise I’ve gotten lately was when a colleague hopped in my office the other day astonished at the depth of meeting minutes I’d prepared for a telecon we’d had last Thursday. “I could never have done that! Reading that was pretty much like being there.” Well, you’d hope that I’d have learned what good minutes look like in parts of eight years of Student Government. [I really want to stay and finish these minutes tonight while they're fresh on my brain, but I've been working proposals for the last hour-and-a-half and have a presing engagement tonight to boot.]

When I hired in as a co-op, and when I was hired as a full-timer, my extracurricular choices—Student Government and hockey broadcasting—were cited as reasons that I stood above the pack. I make no bones about my technical skills: I’m merely an above average engineer. I’d argue that I’m average-to-below average, but I can’t convince my manager of that fact. Maybe I’m bluffing, or maybe I don’t recognize my own competence.

[I think this comes from having a lot of friends who have Ph.D.'s and advanced degrees and feel inferior due to my shitty study skills and desire to do a lot of wacky things outside of my job, all of which keep me from being preternaturally focused on graduate school, which is what you have to do in order to work full-time and do graduate school. If I'm honest, my disappointment with MSMS alumni is disappointment with self.]

I keep going back to that whole “clearly and concisely” bit and find that it’s not often true, that I’m circumferential and allusive and elusive and meandering. [Have you had a conversation with me that's lasted over ten minutes, uninterrupted? You're nodding.] But I guess I’m back to that old saw:

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

– Sir Francis Bacon

Exactly what all the above is, I don’t know for sure. But the little performance eval did certainly start some wheels churning.

I don’t know why, really, but I’ve been reticent to follow my to-do lists, lately. [I hear David Allen telling me that I don't trust my trusted system. He's probably right. I'm human, though.]

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty apathetic: work has been frustrating because we’re pushing paper and not building hardware. I know intellectually that pushing paper is what gets you to building hardware, and while we’re now on the verge of building hardware again, it’s just … gah. It’s not even that I suck at the paper-pushing—I think I do it really well. I’ve just not found much energy for it, and as a result, my work has suffered. I’ll admit it.

I’ll admit that part of my issue is that I really stunk at doing the vacation, and I realized as I drove home tonight why: I wasn’t gone long enough to matter. I don’t mean that from a “I needed a longer vacation”—which, hey, I do—but more from a “I was only going to be gone two days, so it’s not like I was a non-functioning team member that you just had to write off.” I don’t have the vacation banked to do a multi-week vacation, but I think one’s going to be needed next year. As soon as I have an idea of what hardware we’ll be building in the next 12-18 months, I’ll start planning in earnest: come next summer, I should have three weeks banked up. If I took two, I’d be gone long enough that everyone would have to just write me off for that time.

As to the title of this: I just got disgusted with myself today and started to return my faith to the system. It’s worked pretty well—I’ve gotten the bonus of having tackled some things, and the things I’ve gotten done have been relatively important. My @Actions mailbox is clear, and so is @Responses. I don’t owe anyone any email, and that’s always a good feeling.

I just need to wake up with this feeling in about seven hours and push on through tomorrow. Yep … more proposals.

I was reading an invigorating [to me] interview with Adam Greenfield about his upcoming book, Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, and I ran across two consecutive question-and-answer sets that made me really think about the danger of what we’re all doing here on the Internet:

B&A: Then let’s talk about opting out. When we are in control, we have the option to hide, to consider which face to put forward, even to manipulate. Will we still have this ability? And if not, are people ready to lose this control?

AG: I’m not so sure we will retain much of this ability, which in sociology is generally referred to as “presentation of the self.” With so much information about our past and current activities available to be searched, cross-referenced, and made available in real time, when we meet someone for the first time, we are likely going to lose control over the image we present to them.

Imagine what this will look like in practice. Whether you are interviewing a prospective new hire, meeting a potential romantic interest for the first time, or simply sitting next to someone on a plane, you no longer have to take a person at face value. It’s easy to see that this can occasionally be very useful, if you happen to be on the empowered end of the transaction. The trouble is that this ambient intelligence—facilitated by a ubiquitous deployment of informatic systems—cuts both ways.

And with the ability to control how others see us, I believe that we lose also a certain protective and beneficial hypocrisy that allows us to function as a society. We all, without exception, have habits, behaviors, experiences that we don’t necessarily want to share with the wider world. When you evert these experiences, and archive them, and tag them with metadata, and make them persistently accessible, it gets very difficult indeed for anyone to maintain the unimpeachable public façade our current mores require of us.

This is something that people who consider ubiquitous computing from a purely instrumental or technical perspective frequently miss: it’s not just a change in the way we use computers, it’s an alteration in some of the very foundations of the self as it’s been constructed in the West for the last few centuries. We’re in for a wild ride.

B&A: You know that when we’re doing something “on the record,” we tend to act and speak a bit differently, even in contrived ways at times. So how will this awareness of everyware affect how we present ourselves?

AG: Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Anyone who’s had, for one reason or another, to get used to being in front of cameras or microphones with any degree of regularity knows how hard it is to be “natural” when confronted with the prospect of being recorded, or transmitted to a large audience, or both.

When artifacts like cameras and microphones (to say nothing of sensors capable of recording one’s position and location, and verifying one’s identity via unique biometric signatures like retinal patterns or even gait period) are embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life, we all potentially become subject to the most intense kind of mediation. Barring some regulatory or other intervention, we’ll be forced to assume that we’re at least potentially “on,” just about all the time. And the sheer ubiquity of output modes offered by the robust deployment of everyware means that whatever once goes into the network can come out again just about anywhere.

Among other complications, this strikes me as being very likely to give rise to many of what MIT sociology professor Gary T. Marx calls “border crossings”: irruptions of personal information at an unexpected place or a time, in an unexpected context. Again, I don’t think we’re even remotely prepared for what this is going to do to social cohesion.

[Emphasis mine on both parts.]

As I had folks over this weekend, I was interested, as usual, to hear Jeff and Adriene talk about marriage. Adriene related a hilarious anecdote from their second week of marriage regarding how Jeff likes his sandwiches made. It’s such a trivial thing, but … it’s important to us.

I sometimes write about the secrets that we keep from others and even ourselves. I’ve heard many folks—Jeff and Adriene, Stephen and Misty, Mark and Karyn—talk about how marriage is a refining process in their lives. The quote that sticks in my mind from Jeff this weekend is this: “It’s like you go through life with blinders on, and after that first year of marriage, you realize, ‘Oh man, I’m such a horrible person!‘ ”

One of the reason that people so judiciously defend privacy in this age of ubiquitous information is that there’s the risk of being burned. Having an illicit affair? You could be outed. Flirting with some chippie online? Hell, the guy you’re flirting with could be your son! [Try explaining that one to your husband.] We crave privacy because we’re afraid of our true self being rejected.

It’s obvious to me, though, that we want people to be real. When it’s clear in our society that people are being phony, they lose face; many folks believed Rafael Palmeiro’s stern statements about having never used steroids until he was caught by a drug test. Some people always felt Kobe Bryant was putting on a facade, and then he was busted for sexual misconduct. Alex Rodriguez was raked over the coals for his “will he, won’t he” approach to the World Baseball Classic until news came out that his mother wanted to play for the Dominican and his wife wanted him to play for the U.S. [Hey, as much as I'm not a fan of how A-Rod handles himself, that's a shitty position to be in; either way, you're going to make one of the women in your life unhappy.]

I think Greenfield has it right: it’s all about the sociological phenomenon of presentation of self. Some people have found this out firsthand: Mark Pilgrim got fired for writing about his addictions, and, yes, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Heather Armstrong’s firing creating the term “Dooced”. Just as we’re all shocked, shocked, SHOCKED! to find out that we’ve been living next to a serial killer for fourteen years, or maybe even going to church with him, well … yeah. These things happen. Sometimes that guy you thought was a great friend turns out to be a … not-so-great guy.

Some people mourn this loss of privacy. I’m not sure that I do—even as I cover up the things that I want to cover up and keep hidden. Hypocritical, sure, but the answer is that I’m willing to be known as a hypocrite primarily because we could all easily be found out for being one!

I think that the fundamental tension in my writing here is being torn between a desire to flay myself open and the understanding of social norms that prevent me from doing so. Chew on that as you will…

It never fails that I end up giving advice to someone else that I’m refusing to take myself, because in looking at their situation, I see mine. I never know who I’m advising in these situations—them, or me? I guess it’s some of both.

I’m fairly sure that I’m not alone in this. I guess writing this is my way of asking if I am, though; introspection is nice, but flaying myself open a little and letting everyone look inside is both useful and not. Maybe, in looking at my problems, you’ll see your own.

That said, I am going to take the advice I just gave, because I really do think that I need to take it. I’m not ready for all the steps yet, but … I’m ready for this one.

Why are the “high maintenance” and “low maintenance” tags always thrown at women and never at men?

See, honestly, I’m high maintenance. I won’t lie to you. [Well, I would lie to you if you'd let me ... yes, I'd be the worst kind: high maintenance, but pretends he's low maintenance.] I seek approval and affirmation. I can be manipulative. I’m self-aggrandizing and all those really horrible character traits that we associate with being high maintenance. It is not enough for me to know that I’m smart—I have to show you, and I need you to tell me!

Societally, though, we don’t lob the “high maintenance” pejorative at the male of the species. I wonder why…

Well, it’s been a quiet month since quitting graduate school. Suddenly, I have time again to breathe. I was enjoying everything that I was doing then, but not enough to be doing it all at once. I’m definitely learning about limitations on my time and my other personal resources.

I keep forgetting that all the private stuff I’ve been writing about here lately—stuff that probably never sees the light of day, but stuff I need to write about just so that my thoughts and feelings are clear in my head—is stuff that no one but me ever sees. It’s good that it’s private, but it doesn’t do anything to answer anyone’s questions about what’s going on in my life.

Two things that I can share:

1. It looks like we’re going to have to take steps with my maternal grandmother to move her.

   Financially and logistically, the present situation isn’t working. All of us understand and respect her desire to be close to home, but she’s honestly not going to get any better, and if she gets worse, none of us are close enough to do anything about it: I live two hours away, and my parents live almost four hours from her. I think that what will eventually happen is that we’ll have to sell her house and move her up to Tennessee where my parents live, into some assisted living facility in the area that will be suitable to the purpose.

   These are choices that many families get to make every year, so we’re all familiar with them and empathize in our own way. However, when it’s your own family, it his you in a bit different way.

2. Church stuff is going really well.

   I did slip up and mention that I used to be a youth counselor in front of the church secretary and our choir director … who, as it turns out, seems to be acting as the YD right now while we’re between them in our church. I would not mind being involved again, but I have concerns about jumping into any sort of a leadership position anytime soon, if at all. I do have a heart for youth, and I love and miss working with them, but I just dumped something big out of my life, y’know?

So anyway, that’s some of what’s new with me. I’m sorting and sifting through a lot of things right now, all of them good, even if some of them are painful.

If I’m really honest with myself, I’m not cut out for this part-time graduate school stuff. I have a great love for education and learning, and I really am interested in the stuff I’m studying in school. However, when I analyze the stuff I’ve involved myself with in the last few months, since re-starting graduate school, I’m not making class a priority. What is a priority? Honestly, it’s been work. I’ve missed more classes than I’ve made—I’m distance learning, so it’s not all for naught—which tells me that it’s just not that important to me. Given what we’re doing at work—which I can’t talk about, unfortunately, but I will link to appropriate press releases when the time comes—it will not be a priority for me anytime soon.

The last time I gave this a try, I found out that Dad had started work on a Ph.D. while he was running ROTC cadets around at Tennessee. At the time, I was flummoxed that Dad would drop an opportunity to work on a Ph.D.—a Ph.D., with someone else paying for it!—but I now find myself in his exact same shoes, almost 30 years later: stuck between personal growth through employer-supported education and devotion to craft and family.

Something that’s really bothered me the last four to six weeks is that I’ve been so worn out that I’ve not been able to make time for my friends … in one case, at a time when I really feel like one of them needs me. If there’s anything that’s more important to me than work, it’s the relationships I have in my life … and yet they have been suffering as well.

I do know this: if I do decide to drop school again after talking with my boss in the morning, I’m not going to give it a third try while working full-time; if I ever do graduate school, it will be as a full-time student. I was very, very good at the class-work-SGA trifecta when I was an undergraduate; I suck at it now. I only do any one of the three well at any time, and right now, I don’t feel like I do any of the three particularly well—although my esteem about my work is undoubtedly negatively affected by the malaise that’s surrounded me for a couple of weeks now. [My boss still seems really happy with what I'm doing, which tells me that I must not be sucking.]

This just sucks.

Oh, and if you’re feeling like this is all very familiar … it is. I just went back and re-read a bunch of the stuff from three years ago, and it’s all very eerie … coming down to the fact that I’m at the same point in the calendar as when I dropped before.

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.

– Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, The Story Of The Malakand Field Force

I’ve been thinking about cynicism and elitism lately, especially when it comes appreciation of art and pop culture. I used to love to crap on stuff—and honestly, sometimes I still do. However, I’m at a period in my life where I don’t so much live to rip on the really bad stuff as I delight in finding the really good stuff.

As much as I malign cynicism and elitism, Lord knows I have a large oeuvre of cynical, elitist comments. I guess I’m really wanting to repent of it, and go from hating things to appreciating them. Clearly, there’s a lot of crap out there in the world, but truly … one’s man trash is another’s treasure. We all enjoy different things, and I’m really not interested in dogging your taste. I want to know what your taste is, though—and if ours don’t align, cool. I just won’t ask you for opinions on new music [or books, or magazines, or whatever produts of creative work are out there to be explored].

There’s a temptation for me to call this a maturity thing, but I think that’s pure egoism going—I don’t think that everyone goes through a cynical period, but I think that many folks do. Call it what you want—even reference William Blake—but I think that, once you get into cynicism, you have to get out of it eventually. [You might call that becoming cynical about cynicism, if you wish, but rather than being negative about negatives, I'd rather just be positive.]

A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observations.

– Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 291 [2 Feb 1712]

I think that I can be hard to get to know in situations where I’m not physically present with you. I think that there are two reasons for this:

1. Online, I can spew content far more often. Why? I don’t have to shut up and listen and have stop-start conversations.
2. I rarely, if ever, start one-to-one conversations. I’ll talk to you all day long if you start them and keep them going, but … I just rarely start them. If I do start a conversation with you, it’s because I really enjoy your company and value you, or I want to get to know you better.

One of the symptoms of this disease is this concept in my head that I can only “know” so many people at one time, which is a bit of thought that actually has some neurological and psychological bases to it. [Most researchers of such things would argue that we really only "know" and can keep up with 150 people at a time. I have thoughts about how the connectors that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference are simply people who just remember key facts about people outside that 150, but ... another day, perhaps. Probably best after I have a conversation with Dr. Granade about that.]

But anyhow … it always amuses me when someone “new” comes into my sphere, someone I strike a connection with for whatever reason. Without hard facts to back it up, I’d say that this happens more often with women than men, but usually with married women whose relationships I highly admire [take a bow, Kari], so it’s not a picking-up-women thing per se [although it has been and probably will be again, heh].

I’ve said all that to say that I’ve really enjoyed interacting with Heather Green the last few days. I enjoy her wit and wisdom, her writing is fun, and she and Jeff are just great. Plus, she’s keeping me sane in crazy times, and that … that is always a bonus.

Were it not better to forget
Than but remember and regret

– Letitia Elizabth Landon, Despondency

Last Saturday, I helped Jeff grill up burgers and dogs for Amy’s birthday bash, but I wasn’t able to stay long without the cat hair causing my lungs to explode. I bid everyone adieu, and then headed over to the Granades’, figuring that Misty would be up, working on the cross-stitch project she’s been madly trying to finish for a while.

I ended up staying there until almost 0100, as our conversation provided just enough distraction for her to work efficiently on the project, which she finished while we were there. We rambled through a number of discussion topics—which surprises no one who’s had a conversation with me that lasted more than, oh, five mintues; this went more like five hours—and one of them was silly relationship stories. Misty’s a great person for me to talk to for perspective—not only is she a good friend, but she and Stephen have been married for a decade. [In fact, their 10th anniversary was my brother's wedding day. I love it when dates line up and make it easy for me to remember.]

I have never been a ladies’ man—to be honest, I purposely didn’t date in high school. There are two reasons for this: when I was at Forest High, I really didn’t want to date any of the folks from that town, because I didn’t want to associate myself with it at all. Snobbish, but there it is. And when I was at MSMS, well, I made the conscious decision to not date anyone because I didn’t want any relationships to sway my college decision. Mom always said I was a weird kid, and well … it’s true.

In any regard, one story I told was about someone I’ll call … R. She came along at a bad time for me, in this nice, ugly period after the first girl I’d really pursued spurned me, started dating a guy I knew a few days later, and then suckered me to be a groomsman in their wedding. It was a bad time, especially for my liver. [Okay, that's exaggerating.] Anyhow, that period was pretty bad for me, as all my notions about how to go about these female creatures were thrown all a-kilter. Somewhere along here, I realized that some dumb teenage dating was probably the cure for my issues, but I was 19 or 20 and that ship had already sailed.

So, into that maelstrom sails R, who was one of the prettier girls at UAH at the time. If I were to ever list a ton of qualities for a girl to have—and I don’t believe in doing so, because I think that sets up horrible expectations, but that’s another story entirely—she would have had most all of them. Heck, she was even Methodist. I didn’t notice at first that she was really working to spend a lot of time around me, mainly because I was in the process of running for Executive Vice-President of UAH’s student government, and that was pretty well consuming me. But I eventually noticed, and … I was like a deer in headlights. Here, I’ll cut to our conversation [and I'm paraphrasing]:

Me: “And I froze, and I didn’t know how to handle the situation at all. Here was a great, wonderful young woman, seemingly quite interested in me, and I was in this place where I just was naturally assuming that all women would drop me after they got to know me.”

Misty: “Ouch.”

“When I didn’t respond to her, she seemed to grow bitter, and definitely pulled away. Since then, every time I’ve run into her, we have these surface conversations in groups of people, but I usually end up catching her looking at me with a slightly pained expression. I wish I’d been able to say to her at the time, ‘Look, I’m coming out of a really crappy relationship. My head is not in a good place.’ ”

“Well, that’s an awfully mature conversation to be having at that age.”

I didn’t say anything, but right then, Misty was working on some detailed counting thing, and she may not have noticed. But that sorta hit me like a shotgun blast to the face. I’ve learned lately to not regret trying and failing, although trying can certainly be difficult at times given some circumstances; I’ve been far more frustrated with those situations where I’ve not tried at all and been left wondering. When I think of standing at the plate with the bat glued to my shoulder, R’s advances to me always come to mind, and I mentally kick myself. But … Misty’s right, and as I’ve ruminated on that some this week, it’s helped, a lot.

Thanks, dear.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 27, st. 4