Everything At Once

I can count on one hand the number of times everything has been good at once. Actually, I can count on one finger. It was basically last year around May, for about two weeks. It was good while it lasted, but I should have appreciated it more. Usually, if one part of my life is up and good, there's the other part that's down and bad. I'm not whaa-whaaing about this [1], I realize it's par for the course for most people's lives, and I actually have it much better than probably 70% of the world. Still, I can't help wondering what it would be like to have everything at once.

Cindy and I are the one constant that's always good. Cindy's professional career is usually good, too. Right now it's great. She got a good raise and a great year end bonus. I'm happy for her, she deserves it. My daughter, on the other hand, is not constant. Just when I sort of get to stop worrying about one thing, another pops up. If that gets solved or at least fixed a bit, an old thing rears its ugly head, or a brand-new crisis comes forth. If she's mentally healthy, then she's physically sick. If she's physically fit, then sure enough her emotional well-being is horrible. Usually, of course, it's a bit of both, because some of her emotional stuff directly effects her physically.

Sometimes it's almost a bit too much for me to take, for she's a thousand miles away and there's very little I can do at the spur of a moment after a frantic phone call. Also, there's really only so much you can do for other people; they really do have to help themselves, especially if that "help" is going to be a permanent, life-changing help and not just a short, temporary antidote. Now I'm sounding like John Galt or something. While I'm all for teaching people to fish, they have to be alive to make use of this skill. It's a fine scary line and I don't know where it is with her sometimes.

My own professional career is also inconsistent, too, but I've more or less given up on that a few years ago. By "given up" I mean given up worrying about whether or not I've made a difference to the world (not to my friends or family, but the world in general in a professional, what-have-you-done-to-make-this-a-better-place kind of way). Still, occasionally, this gets to me a bit, too.

Because of this I have to guard myself from unhealthy thinking. For example, when a bunch of things are going well at the same time I often get worried, wondering if there's another shoe about to drop in order to punish me in a sort of schadenfreudeish (pretend that's a word) kind of way for daring to realize my good fortune. Like most people, I don't have to worry about that too often, however.

[1] I mean besides making a blog post about it and all. ;-)

What I Don't Miss About Real Winter

It's' cold here today, and by that I mean it's 27° (Fahrenheit). Not bitterly cold, but cold by Dallas standards. Sometimes I sort of miss the harsh winters of Chicago, where everything had a blanket of white (well, white for a while, then more like a blanket of grey) for weeks on end. When it does snow here, which is rare, it rarely sticks for more than a day or two, and then usually just on earth and grass, never pavement.

What I don't miss, and here we're finally getting to the point of the title, is the shoveling of snow. And it's not really the shoveling per se that I miss, but rather a small event that is a subset of shoveling snow. I don't think this event has a name, but I'll call it the "scrape-thunk-ouch!" event. To whit:

You're a 12 year old boy either shoveling your family's sidewalk out of forced servitude or a neighbor's sidewalk for a buck.

Okay. So far so good. You shove the blade of the shovel down through the snow until it hits the hard sidewalk, then you angle the shovel so it's more parallel with the sidewalk and push forward, thus clearing a snow-free path.

Fine.

Every so often, however, whilst pushing forward, the blade of the shovel will meet resistance from a seam or crack in the sidewalk, and thus suddenly your forward progress is halted with a thunk. Also, since you've been using a fair bit of force to push the shovel forward, this sudden stop is rather jarring and unexpected, and due to the cold temperatures, it sends a wave of pain through your hands. Ouch.

Hence the aforementioned name of this event.

So yeah, I don't miss that.