Tag Archives: sanity

Waiting, Changing, and Fighting

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People often ask me “How do you keep going?” It’s a silly question.

Quincy Behind Bars

My daughter is in the CICU at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta – Egleston, and if you want to know more about it you can follow on her Facebook page with more pictures and updates and stuff.

If you know me personally, or you’ve read some of my past stuff, you’re aware that fourteen years ago I spent seven days in the NICU with my first child. He didn’t survive. It was very difficult.

An ICU stay with my infant child is pretty much my personal worst level of hell; it’s the nightmare I can’t wake up from. I can safely say I would rather entertain rabid howler monkeys with a sock-puppet made from my own scrotum than spend so much as one more minute in a C/N/PICU with my child. And yet, this is the ticket that I’ve punched, this is the journey that I get to make again. Continue reading →

Decide. Commit. Succeed.

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In the early summer of 2004 more than a decade of poor health choices caught up with me. It’s was hard to think of it as a decade of poor health choices, and if you’d have asked me about my health up to that point I’d have described it as “fair.” Which would have been grossly inaccurate.

When I was in high school, I remember how frustrated I was that I could never gain weight. Perhaps that doesn’t make sense from a mid-thirties perspective, but when you’re seventeen and weigh a-buck-forty at five-eleven (and one-forty was probably after a heavy meal and wearing a winter jacket soaked in water…or concrete), all you want is to “bulk up.”

I ran everyday, I had “a runner’s body,” and I hated it. My best friend had a naturally broad build with a thick chest and strong shoulders. He looked like the cover model from romance novels…and it drove me crazy. My jealousy was both good-natured and palpable.

I ate everything. And a lot of it. When I was actively running regularly and working manual labor jobs for six hours a day, I estimate I was consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000-8000 calories a day. And I didn’t gain a pound. Not one.

Some of the most embarrassing photos of my life…

The Anticipation of Misery

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There is no word in the English language that describes that moment when we know something we will not like is about to happen but we also have to make a brave face and happily march into the hail of emotional bullets on the other side of the trench we’ve dug ourselves into. It’s the perfect mix of dread and consignment and acting. No matter how much I might hate for her to leave, no daughter deserves a distressful send off as she prepares to make the five-hour trip across the country by herself.

Cute Pictures and Bad Poetry…

Saying something now…

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…because I won’t feel like saying anything later.

For once, I’m trying to be realistic about what comes next. In under 24 hours (more like 17) Sarah will walk back down a jetway and board a flight back to her mother. I always try to convince myself that “I’ll be fine” and it won’t really affect me, the practical part of me knows that tomorrow I won’t feel like blogging. At all.

So, I’ve decided to ask my blog-friends for help. When you read this tomorrow (as I assume most of you will), would you please remind me to write more. Write something. Write anything. I always feel better when I do…and I’m gonna need all the kicks in the pants I can get to push me across the chasm between writing nothing and writing something.

I’ve got the genesis of a music-based post largely inspired by finding that picture of my 1974 Van, as well as the next few “What I’m Looking For” lines in various states of done (and by done I mean partial drafts and/or fragments) so I should be able to wrap myself around something.

Or I can just go off on my opinion about substituting “Young Earth Creationism” for science in school curriculum. I’ve got a good sized blog post about that built up after a week with Sarah and “I don’t need to learn that because GodDidIt” being a good enough excuse for a nine-year-old lacking a fundamental understanding of things like heliocentrism, what stars are, the minimal basics of biology, or the fact that atomic particles aren’t imaginary and just made up by scientists who refuse to believe in GodDidIt.

Anyway, I could (and just might) go off on that for quite the spiel but now isn’t the time.

Now is the time to ask for help. Tomorrow will suck, and I need people to remind me to do the things that help me get past the suck that I never remember to do when things suck.

So…please…start reminding me tomorrow. I will deeply appreciate it.

A Moment of Sanity

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As anyone who listens to the news is aware, Federal Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled in Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger et al in California today, and for the first time in quite some time, I feel like the America I live in is becoming a little bit more like the America that I aspire for it to be.

The ruling can be read here (it’s a .pdf) and starting on page 109 Judge Walker provides some of the most profoundly rational and reasonable findings I’ve come across in a federal ruling in a long time.  I’ve read the entire finding, and I encourage anyone to do the same.  It’s very approachable, and draws clear and reasonable conclusions.  Judge Vaughn will be excoriated as an “activist judge” by many on the losing side of this finding (which is hardly a risky prophecy given the love of some groups to trot out that phrase at the drop of a hat) and I honestly encourage people to take 10 minutes and read what the judge has to say, and read why he makes the decisions he makes.  It’s not a difficult read, just 25 pages of double-spaced, courier font goodness.  This is the essence of how America works.

I’m not a political blogger, nor am I a law blogger, nor am I an LGBT-issues blogger…nor am I a member of any of the classes of people that are directly affected by this ruling…but I am affected by the spirit of this ruling.  I have family that will be affected by this ruling. I have children who will live and love and marry in an American legal landscape decided by the ultimate Supreme Court review of this ruling.  I can only hope and pray that the Supreme Court of the United States gets it as right as Judge Walker got it today.

The conclusions of Judge Walker’s ruling:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.