Wendi beat me to it, but that wasn’t difficult considering it took me until almost bedtime to write about this.

While the real breakup is a few years gone, now, today marks the first time that the date of our wedding anniversary has come after our divorce was legally finalized. I quipped to her this morning that it’s our first “non-anniversary.” (Yes, we still chat. Whatever else happened, we ended the marriage as friends. That’s gotta count for something.) I have, as you can imagine, mixed feelings about this. Mostly I’ve been trying not to spend too much time looking back on how badly I screwed things up in the early days. I also don’t want to get too caught up in missing the really good times, because that’s not particularly healthy either. Where we are now, individually, is far healthier than anyone could have expected. It hasn’t been easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is, right?

And I’m going to repeatedly tell myself that until I pull myself out of this funk I’m in… hopefully in time for someone‘s visit this weekend.

We bring you this report, live from Southeast Portland. We’re here to confirm that Old Man Winter’s last hurrah is still going strong, with bitingly cold temperatures and a nasty wind that only recently has begun dying down a smidgen.

So, what have the kids and I been up to? We’ve killed time playing games and watching movies, eating various concoctions (most of which involve cheese, ’cause we’re cheesy that way), and generally behaving ourselves. Oh, and trying to keep warm. This place can get awfully drafty. Brr. I did run the kids through their required gamut of chores, but that didn’t take very long. My daughter’s week-long grounding from All Things Electronic ended today, and she’s taken full advantage of that.

Since my favorite electronic addiction is playable here (though 256k DSL is no competition for the cable hookup at home), I managed to ding a few characters up to key levels, such as getting my Ninja Mastermind up to level 14, the benchmark for all “lowbie” heroes and villains as that’s when the travel power becomes available. She can fly now. Yay! What’s more, I may have rekindled the spark of enjoyment in my kids for the game. One can hope, considering how much a year I spend so they can share an account. Not that I mind, but if they decide not to play the game anymore I can certainly use that money elsewhere, you know?

Anyway, I go home tomorrow, to my own bed, one that isn’t right overhead of annoying neighbors with delusions of musical talent who like to “practice” until 3:00am. (I wish I was joking, here. Argh.) And since I don’t have to work Monday, I get to sleep all kinds of in, tomorrow night. Hot dog.

I hope your weekend is at least as enjoyable as mine, friends.

My son sent me the following in an email a few days ago, and I asked his permission to post it here for your entertainment. Enjoy, won’t you?

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I was bored in PE this morning, as usual, because they had us playing basketball. I hate basketball. It’s the worst sport. Then I thought, why? Why is it the worst school sport? I came up with a couple theories.

Property of Popularity

In middle school there are the popular kids and the unpopular kids. There are plenty of popular kids.

There are also quite a few basketball hoops in our gym, and about as many tens of basketball players. Of course, this is common for any selection of schools. But anyway, I wondered one morning if there was a connection. What made students popular? What you looked like? What friends you had? How much profanity you can utter in a single sentence? These are merely subfactors.

The true determining measure of popularity in my school is basketball skill. If a person plays basketball very well, or at least a lot, then that person is seen as a very athletic person who takes interest into a very popular thing.

With this new theory, we can safely assume that

Popularity = Basketball Skill(appearance + relationships + vocabulary)

Basketball Is A Team Sport No Longer

As the property above suggests, basketball has become a contest for individual popularity. The popular kids have to outplay the unpopular kids. Therefore, the unpopular kids, such as myself, never get the ball.

A popular kid with the basketball will pass to another popular kid, but this merely adds to the relationships variable in the Theory of Popularity. And they will hardly add any other signs of cooperation at all. Teamwork is invalid. Seriously athletic kids in middle school are, with little variation, people who only care about their own popularity.

Theory of Gym Relativity

The unpopular kids probably find that the popular kids don’t notice them in a game. At all. A player could be WIDE open, and the popular player will go on without a clue. This may trigger thoughts like, “What am I, invisible?!”

Maybe that’s the case, to a degree.

If you aren’t in possession of anything important (like, for instance, a basketball), there’s no worth in making interaction. Especially if you are standing still. Then you are the closest thing to invisible.

This even works in dodgeball. If you stand perfectly still next to a wall, and you don’t have a ball, popular kids won’t take notice of you. This is because, in relativity to them, you are worthless and therefore nonexistent. There aren’t many variables to this. I’ve tried it and it works.

~Spud

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Come to think on it, I don’t miss middle school. Not one bit…

I love my iRiver T30 portable player. It holds 512 megabytes’ worth of my favorite music, and does a reasonable job of randomly stringing songs together. (Mind you, I made a point of renaming the 60 files that I’ve loaded so far in such a way as to ungroup the songs by a particular artist. This helps a lot, I suspect.) This morning, however, it seems to have taken my current state of mind strongly into account. Sure, the morning commute started on a bright, perky note with Oranges and Lemons’ “Soramimi Cake” followed by The Space Brothers’ “I Still Love You,” but after that things took a turn for the moody.
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The posting really slacked off, didn’t it?

Which is to say, I’m slacking off. I’m two weeks behind on Mai Otome recaps. I haven’t touched either of my video projects, let alone the LP dubbing project. I need to do one last website conversion. There’s cleaning to be done around the house that I ought to take care of. I’ve not kept in as close of touch with people I call my friends as I probably should. (An oft-quoted motto of mine: To have a friend, be a friend.)

I’m feeling so uncertain and so unenergized lately that it’s hard to work up enthusiasm for much of anything. In a weird sort of way this has worked out for Dawn and I in that our gaming schedule has taken a major upswing… but that’s at the expense of everything I just listed. This isn’t to say that I need to cut out the gaming; indeed, game time is some of our best quality time when we’re “at distance.” I’m also not blaming the game time. I simply haven’t felt motivated to do much else. One might call it a crisis of faith, in that I’ve lost faith in myself, but mine isn’t a faith-based personality to begin with. So, what do you call it? I have no idea… and of course, that doesn’t really help, does it?

(and as I write this, I spill soda on my shirt and pants. I miss the keyboard, thank goodness. I just finished my laundry a few minutes ago, thanks for asking.)

I look around at all of the reminders, empty places where Things I Said I Would Definitely Accomplish should reside. Each one sucks a bit of life out of me, from the basket of garbage that needs emptying (“I Will Definitely keep my room trash-free”) to the little stack of “Day The Universe Changed” DVDs awaiting the last disc to become a complete set. Nevermind my checkbook (“I Will Definitely build my financial buffer back up”) and the cardboard boxes of books (“I Will Definitely get a bookshelf this month”) and the saved emails (“I Will Definitely take care of these things for the people I care about”). Nevermind the big stuff, like “Am I asking my kids the questions that will help them open up to me more?” and “Do they honestly believe I care about them and enjoy their company?” and “Am I a good relationship partner?” and “Am I sticking with this job because it’s truly good for me or because I’m too afraid to try for better?”

Very little in my life has changed in the last year. There were a few significant improvements, to be sure, but I don’t think I have changed much. I may even have deteriorated in some important ways. What’s worse, I wonder sometimes if I’m really being true to myself like I promised myself I would be, back when things went terribly catastrophic. How badly have I fallen back into who I used to be? I honestly believe I’ve not done so too much, but that belief doesn’t erase all of the doubts.

And when you get right down to the core of it… am I willing to do what it takes to feel good about the direction my life is going?

“Gloomy thoughts for a Sunday evening,” you might say, and you’d be right. It hasn’t even been a bad day, truth be told, so it’s not like there’s anyone to blame (but myself) for the state of mind I’m in. As usual, it’s just something I must work through for myself. It happens, yes?