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About this blog

I have found blogging to be useful to me in the past. I get to write what I would write in a journal; anonymous people get to read and comment; everyone is happy.

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And I was worried about only posting once a year ...

This time it was four years since the last post. And sixteen years since I first joined the site.  I'm 63 (as of today).  That's over a quarter of my life.  And a quarter of the 16 years, I haven't been here enough to update what was once a daily blog. There's documentation of some of the shittiest times of my life on here, but also a record of many instants of joy, some of the best times of my life.  Then there's the four-year gap, which speaks volumes about how little use I've made o
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Why Are We Here?

Okay, not in the huge sense, or we'd be here all day ... What I'm wondering is, what are we getting from the site, these days?  Does it still provide what people need? I guess the answer would have to be different for the two major user groups we have, the SPS guys, and everyone else. The SPS forum continues to be active, particularly for a small number (fewer than a dozen, say) of regular contributors.  The opinions differ somewhat, as in any conversation, but the forum itself at
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Morning Limerick

There once was a poet named Gorinj Who was seeking a rhyme for "orange,"            He struggled all day            Then said, "What the hey," Gave up and became a grocer.
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Vocational Rehabilitation

"Vocation" originally meant the calling that priests were expected to feel when they chose to enter the priesthood.  It only later came to mean whatever career a person chose. I chose to make a right turn fairly late in my life, and go from a quarter century or so of computer programming to a new profession, psychological counseling.  The change required that I get at least a master's degree, which at my age is probably as far as I will go. What made me decide to make such a change?  W
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And Another One's Gone ...

I was surprised the last time I found I hadn't posted here in a year.  Now it has happened again. I think part of the reason I turned away from the site is that I turned away from myself, a little.  Not consciously, but perhaps I was trying to turn towards whatever the counseling profession was or is, or what I thought it was.  It's four years later, and I still haven't finished.  I put off the practicum last Fall, and though I took it this Spring, I received a "Does not meet expectations"
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A Year Gap

I think this is the longest gap there's ever been in this blog, which has been running since 2008. I guess nothing too surprising happened this past year:  classes go on;  it will soon be time for practicum, where the rubber meets the ... forehead of the client;  I went back to work for the big-box grocery-slash-everything chain I worked for before ...  All the usual anniversaries went by:  my hospitalization, my ex filing a restraining order that began the end of our marriage, and so on, b
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Reasonable

Whenever I post a blog entry that isn't entirely positive, people quite reasonably respond that it's quite reasonable for me to feel that way. But I don't feel quite reasonable about it.  I know what reasonable is, what reality is.  But I don't have to like it. Isn't that the definition of suffering, not liking what is real?  Eh, maybe not.  More like, not accepting what is real;  liking is something else and totally up to the individual.  But not accepting is like one of my favorite e
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Who Do They Think I Am?

So, here I am in my fourth semester of a master's program in Counseling Psychology.  In danger of failing another class. Maybe it's a Spring thing;  that's when I last had this trouble.  Maybe it's that my classes this time are again challenging beliefs instead of providing facts.  Challenging beliefs should be a good thing;  unchallenged ones lack detail and fail to inspire confidence. But what it feels like is that each class, in a different way, is telling me that I'll make a great
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Anniversaries - How You Know Time Is Passing

This is probably appropriate for a New Year's post ... Ten years ago December 30th, I checked myself into a locked psych ward, feeling depressed and suicidal.  The amusing thing is how quickly I felt better, isolated away from my ex.  By the third or fourth day, folks around me were clamoring to get out;  I was quite content in there. I still had to go back, and stayed with her for just over a year more.  But, though I had some periods of depression that year, I found that I had begun
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All

There is a t-shirt I have (that is, that I asked my wife to buy me for a birthday) which has a saying on it that inspires me both on the face of it and by the thoughts that it triggers in me.  I have considered sharing those before, but have always put it off, fearing that it might end up silly or preachy or make me look foolish. Eventually, though, I realized that my own negativity about how my thoughts might be received was depriving me of the chance to organize those thoughts in writing, and
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Define "failure"

So, here I am back on the site, after my second semester. One of the things that brings me back is the perception of having lost something. I have checked in, on occasion;  sometimes run updates or whatever;  read some posts that I thought might be interesting.  So why has it been so hard to post anything? Part of it is a kind of fatigue.  The program I'm in is very "stretching";  it makes you ask yourself over and over whether you're sure of things you've believed most of your li
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Resumption

So, after a long hiatus (Latin for gap, and not for what it sounds like), I think it's time I resumed using this thing. For a long time, I think I was put off by the fact that I have friends.  That is, it felt like writing here was a performance, for people I already knew would approve.  Not much challenge in that, and because I wanted them to continue to approve, even some incentive to be circumspect, to include only the good stuff. When approval starts to be an issue, you get dissoci
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Mawwiage

Twue Wuv! Okay, so I can't do this without quoting The Princess Bride, maybe because I'm wearing a mask and a tiny Dread Pirate Roberts mustache, or maybe because my head is lolling around from just having been resuscitated ... But I'm getting married tomorrow!  :-) That's been the plan, ever since I moved up here a couple of years ago to be with her, but up until now, it had seemed better to put it off.  For one thing, my previous marriage was not a picnic, much less twue wuv, so
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So, define "trying"

So, if the outcome is out of your hands, how (or what) do you keep on trying? The application for grad school was due May 15, and I sent mine in almost a month early.  However, I still haven't heard, which probably doesn't mean very much because they would have to wait for any late submissions, and it's only been a week and a half since the deadline. But ... it leaves me with what I'm supposed to be doing in the meantime.  There are plenty of things that I could be doing that would be
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Keep On Trying

Well, since the Universe sneezed on my attempt to post a lengthy entry yesterday, I will now give the abridged version. I've been avoiding posting on my blog, and elsewhere on the site too, largely because I've been going through a process of my own which has made me feel less authoritative in what I might say.  What I want to apologize for is the belief that anything else I've ever posted really was authoritative, in some way.  If I can't be comfortable being as
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The Box Tender

Once there was a man who was a box tender. Now, you might not think that boxes need much tending, and in a sense, you'd be right. Individually, a box is fairly self-sufficient and well suited to its basic function, which is to enclose something. But in large groups, the situation becomes more complicated. When there are different boxes, you have to keep the different kinds separate. You have to keep them lined up in neat little rows, with their labels facing out so people know which box they
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Riddle

This riddle came to me around the time I woke up this morning. 1. Find the person with the shortest name. 2. Challenge them to a fight. 3. Wager everything you possess, and all your wisdom and strength. 4. Fight. 5. Lose. This will give you all you desire. How? Answer: The person with the shortest name is "I". Okay, weird, I know, and maybe logically flawed somewhere. But I didn't really "compose" it, it came to me, so I just thought I would put it here and see what folks thought.
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Gap

Okay, that was rather a longer gap than I prefer ... First news, I guess, is that I got a part time, minimum wage job at the beginning of November at a locally-owned chain of food/everything stores, working in the "hard goods" department, which is basically everything except food and clothing: housewares, hardware, sporting goods, toys ... Needless to say, the toy section of any large store at Christmas time is not the place to learn about the Christmas spirit. It's a bit embarrassing, given w
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Miscellaneous Poem-like Objects (MPOs)

How Far is Away? Seventeen floors over Shinjukuwondering if the glass would breakKeeping vigil through the nighton loose chairs in Edinburgh AirportWhen you go that far away from yourselfwho is it you come back to?------------------------------------------------------------- Smart Man It's late and the old man is downstairs watching football on the TV, curled sideways in front of his best chair, the way he always drank beer. My mother is sitting behind him, knitting and pretending to watch
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A Little Something Inspired by an Airplane Ride

We were away for a few days, visiting family, but we're back now. I wrote this in the plane home: Good Head and Shoulders When the world falls away, the ride can get bumpy. But once you're up there, the sky's always clear. The trick to the future is it's made up of presents: don't worry about this one; the next one is here. One step at a time is the only way forward. You only die once; there's nothing to fear.
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Reorientation

So ... it's been a fairly long interlude, I guess. Many little milestones have passed without comment: moved out of the apartment, cleared out the storage area, finished dealing with Dad's inheritance except for the annuity thing, figured out my taxes, and so on. What hasn't happened, though, is for me to make the key decisions about the future. I did decide, though mostly by default, not to apply for grad school for the coming fall; I didn't feel like I was ready, by the March 15th deadline.
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An Interlude of Illness

Well, the New Year began well enough, but Thursday night I got pretty sick (in an "I don't want anything left in my digestive tract" kind of way), and that kept me down completely Friday and Saturday. My temperature's back to normal again, and I'm eating, so I think I'm pretty much done, now. I'm just caught up enough to come back here, though, so I thought I would let people know that I wasn't ignoring them, just ... indisposed.
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The Bunny Has Landed

Well, after an exciting couple of days, I have arrived. We didn't do anything sophisticated for my Dad; he wasn't the sort who'd want that anyway. We scattered him with Mom on a hillside in the shadow of a mountain (in West Virginia, to be honest, it's just a bigger hill.) They overlook a pond that had some ducks and geese in it, but again, in West Virginia, if it's standing water, it's behind a man-made dam. Still, it was a spot they both loved, so I'm happy they found it. Truck rental was
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Moving On

Well, we scattered my dad's ashes yesterday, on the same spot as my mom's, five years later. They get to be together again ... And then we had Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant with my brother and his family. Today, though, is the first leg of my cross-country move. Packing to do, truck to rent, car to tow. But we decided to break it into two segments, so I booked a hotel near the halfway point. That will give us more time on Saturday for the unload. I'll probably be away a little while un
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I'm a Roof!

So, another overdue update. My actual last day at work was the 15th; I took various forms of leave for the week of the 22nd. And I had a hard time being productive. Partly the sudden change of being off work, and partly having to cope with the changes coming up. Unfortunately, instead of "coping" very much, I opted to spend my time reading. I couldn't even do anything productive, because reading is the only thing that occupies enough of my brain to push the rest out. What I didn't realize is
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