Can You Honestly Evaluate

...the story from within
Without part of you blocking the way

-The Sons, "Freedom"**

Yesterday, I sat down and went to therapy--with myself, that is. I decided to take stock of things after hearing news that Dad was in the hospital again last night. He's ok, now; blockage in his gall bladder that's now cleared up. But when I talked to him, he seemed less interested in discussing his condition than how my life was going up here.

That's when all these things inside came to a head.

I've been here about six weeks now. The first three, we were getting ourselves situated, trying to make the transition in time for The Wife to start her job at the School on the Hill. I mean, she started training the Monday after we got here, had a couple weeks off, then had to hit the ground running again.

About that time, I fcuked up my hand. It took about two weeks before it started functioning semi-normally again. Right now, I've got about 98% of my movement back, enough to swing shilelaghs around. But, it was a depressing time. I had started to confuse the feelings of unemployment with the bad parts of my self-image, which wasn't a hard thing to do considering there I was, hair growing out, 5 lbs. heavier (ok, 10), with a bandaged up hand.

So, now I've been at home, been a good house husband, letting my hand heal up, and I guess what I've been doing is sitting around going "Now, what?"

See, my normal pattern would have been to let the thing with my Dad pile up on top of all the other things I irrationally depressed myself over, and let it sideline me for a couple of weeks. And, as I was discussing with The Wife, I probably could've gotten away with it for another couple of weeks. After all, the clothes still fit, she's getting regular paychecks, and someone's gotta load and unload the dishwasher. Except that it would've been two weeks later and I would be no closer to accomplishing what I want to accomplish.

That's the other part of the confusion. It's not been a simple case of me twiddling my thumbs, watching Springer, and not doing jack crap. But, there was time wasted--or rather, misappropriated--and that's the issue. So, rather than being depressed doing nothing for two weeks, and I'm going to spend the next two weeks getting this train moving. Gonna put the metrosexual face back on and pimp myself out someplace. And, even if everything I try catastrophically fails, it still will not have been two weeks that would've been wasted otherwise. Even in the worst case scenario, I'll still feel better about myself than I have been.

**BTW, my copy of Hip Li'l Dreams came in yesterday. I'll do a review after I listen to it a few more times.