But even so...its the best teacher we have. No lessons stick like the ones taught to us by experience.
The new soccer season begins tonight, we finished third in our little division of ten teams. We missed out on promotion by a few points, but that's okay. We're a bunch of guys who play for the fun, even if it does simmer over now and again. It's the fun. And we have new official team jerseys:
Yep, that's them. Pretty sweet-looking, huh?
So what's happened since I last put fingers to keyboard in a meaningful way to write about the tedious goings on in my life and in the twisting, winding, dead-ending corners of my brain?
Most significant is that Jen went to New York again. This time she asked if I'd house-sit. So I did.
The first day of house-sitting...I went to visit some friends who needed an extra set of hands to dig out a flat surface for an above-ground pool. Now, I am not entirely comfortable wearing work gloves. They give me worse blisters than no gloves at all. So I proceeded, glove-less, to tear up my hands. It was good, though.
There's something very satisfying about the kinds of aches you get from manual labor. They're not like the self-inflicted aches of exercising at the gym, or the third-party-inflicted aches of team sports -- these aches are very different. They're about a connection with something much older than ourselves. Just me, a spade, and a pile of dirt. Those blisters have something almost noble attached to them, they tell a story of building a shelter, of clearing land to farm, of honing tools, rock against rock.
That was July 4th weekend, and my weight went up to 214lbs. I was not happy. Then on Thursday I got a stomach virus. I won't go into details, but my body was rejecting every mouthful of food I tried to eat. By Saturday when I was finally feeling a little better, I was down to 202lbs. A week later, I was under 200.
Sure, I thought, most of that will be muscle atrophy and dehydration. But it's stayed off somehow, and that makes me feel pretty good.
I don't get business cards through my job, though I probably could if I asked. So I went to VistaPrint and ordered my own. They look like this:
...and yes, I have a new URL, BadWithConviction. It's from this quote from a letter by Dylan Thomas:
"Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction."
It's not up and running yet, but it will contain links to the things I write, probably this blog included.
In personal things, the confusion I have been feeling about Jen is now, mostly, gone. She told me she thought it would be good for me to date other people, and I think she's probably right. Her grandmother does, too -- I went to visit with her on Saturday and we had some surprising and frank conversations. And I am now actively dating, it seems.
Don't expect salacious details here, but you might get reports of things that change my perspective, and how that happens.
So this is likely to be the last of the open heart surgery songs. I expect the tone will change in the future.