Gaze Deep Into My Navel And Despair...

How am I supposed to grow up?

I want to grow up.  I really do.  No, more than that, I need to.  I need to grow the fuck up.  I'm almost forty years old, but I still see myself as if I were twenty-five.  That might sound appealing on some level, at first; "young at heart" and all that.  And maybe it would be, if that's what I wanted for myself.  But it isn't.  I want to grow up.  I need to grow up, because I can't keep living like I'm twenty-five.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.  I can't eat like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't move like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't party like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  Fuck, I can't even sleep like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  It all hurts me now in a way that it never did, and I can feel myself breaking down at an astonishing rate, as if the force of Entropy inside me were being fed by some radioaction of chemical combustion.  Accelerated Decrepitude.  But on the other hand, trying to live within my almost-forty means, while still feeling like a twenty-five year-old inside, is so monumentally depressing that I can't even fucking bother; I always just end up feeling like I already have one foot in the grave.

A twenty-five year-old trapped in a forty year-old body.  How incredibly pathetic.  How incredibly modern.  How incredibly privileged.

But how am I supposed to grow up?  I don't know.  My observations tell me that for most people, this happens as a natural side-effect of breeding.  That creating a child shifts all perspectives, and forces the new parent into a maturity that cannot be achieved through any other means.  That makes sense to me.  I can understand that.

But I'm never going to have any children.  So what am I supposed to do?  How am I supposed to force myself to achieve a state that, for most people, requires quite possibly the single most life-altering event they will ever experience in order to achieve?

Sometimes I think, maybe I don't actually need to grow up?  If I don't have any children, then what do I need to grow up for?  Why do I feel this need anyways?  I can only assume it is because I reflexively compare my life to the model my parents set for me.  When I look at myself, and try to judge whether I'm doing well or not, I compare it to the life they lived.  And I always feel myself coming up short.

They went to college.  They got degrees.  They worked hard.  (My father still works harder than almost anyone else I know, and while my mother never worked as hard as he did, she still inarguably worked harder than I do now.)  They bore and raised children.  They owned houses, with yards and multiple floors and everything.

But I dropped out of college.  I have no degrees, and probably never will.  Yeah, I have a career that doesn't leave me wanting to kill myself, but I still hate it, just because it's work, and I hate work of any kind; I hate being forced to sell myself every day in order to sustain myself.  I don't own a house.  I own an absurdly tiny condo that I hate and will never be able to sell for as much as I paid for it.  I am almost certain I will end up having to live in that tiny little box for the rest of my life, watching it deteriorate around me, with me - and that thought terrifies me on a regular basis.

And even these modest achievements - a well-paying job that I can sort of do well and tolerate, and a tiny little condo I'm trapped in like a prison cell - even these barely note-worthy accomplishments I never actually earned; I didn't work hard to achieve these things.  I got this job because some well-meaning middle-aged women that I worked with took pity on me, and talked to their bosses, and told them they knew this kid they thought would do well as a programmer.  And they were right - I am a good programmer.  At least, I'm alright.  But again, not because I try to be, or because I studied or worked hard or went to school or anything else.  I just have a natural talent for logic and pattern recognition and symbology, and so I am a naturally decent programmer.  I could be a great programmer if I wanted to be; if I tried to be and put forth the effort.  But I don't.  Because I don't care.  I only want to put forth the minimum amount of effort to get by, and save the rest for indulging in my life's pleasures.

And it's a similar story with my "home."  I didn't work hard and save money every day so that I could eventually put a down payment on my dream home.  My grandfather died, and since my mother (his daughter) was already dead herself, the portion of his life's wealth that should have been hers (and he had worked hard all his life to achieve that wealth) came to me instead.  And I used all of that money to buy the apartment I had been living in for almost a decade at that point.  The biggest, most "adult" accomplishment of my life - becoming a home-owner - and it only happened because I was in a position to profit off of the deaths of two of my close family members.  And so it has never felt like an accomplishment to me.  It feels like blood money.

(It's true that I performed magick to get the job and the money and the apartment, but even taking the assumption that my magick worked doesn't help the situation any.  Magick is a short-cut.  It's easy compared to actually working hard to learn or to save money.  And it's fun to do, and for that reason alone I wanted to do it, whether it worked or not.  So even assuming that I came by these things through sorcery, it still doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me.  It still doesn't feel like I really earned them.  It feels like I cheated.)

And I will almost certainly never see that much money again in my lifetime.  I can barely maintain a savings of more than a couple of thousand dollars at a time.  I live paycheck-to-paycheck, even with my fairly significant salary.  I've always been that way.  If I have money, I want to spend it on making myself feel good right now, and I can't seem to deny myself comfort or happiness in the present, in order to save it for some undefined future.  As I've written here before, I feel like the Grasshopper, fiddling away as the first snow begins to fall.

But why do I determine the value of my life by comparing it to my parents'?  They were completely different people, living in a completely different time.  And who wanted completely different things from their life than I want from mine.  And I know this.  But I still can't shake this feeling that I am somehow failing at life, because I seem to remember my parents being so much better off in their twenties than I am in my thirties; or will be in my forties.  I just want to be happy, like anyone else.  But I constantly and consistently feel that the things that make me happy aren't good for me.  That they are self-indulgent, or immature, or masturbatory.  That I am a bad person for living my life the way that I do.  But trying to live my life any other way always leaves me just as miserable, if only in a different way.

I just want to spend my life relaxing in the bathhouse, playing games, reading, writing, watching TV and movies, sleeping, eating, drinking and getting high, and punctuating the whole thing with the occasional orgasm.  That is really all I want from life.

And I feel like a worthless waste of a human being for feeling that way.  I hate myself for feeling that way.  But even so, I have no idea how to change it; I have no idea how to want anything else.

Okay, sure, I want other things.  Bigger things.  I want to have a big house with a yard and a basement and an attic.  I want to be able to support myself through writing, or some other form of creative expression.  (If only I could make a living playing games!)  I want a sense of accomplishment.  I want to feel like my life mattered, in any way.  I want to feel a sense of confidence that when I'm gone, I will have made some mark on the world that is all my own; that I will leave behind something more than a pile of carbon dust.  I do want all of these things.  But when I think about them, and I envision the monumental amount of work it would take to even try to achieve any of them - with no guarantee of success! - I lose any hope I may have had about ever actually achieving them.

Because I know that I will never do that work.  I just don't have it in me.  Achieving anything of any real significance requires a single-minded devotion that I just don't have.  Have never had.

Because deep-down, I don't want to be great.  All I really want is to be comfortable.  And I guess I am.  So I should be happy, then, right?  Then why do I feel this way?  I just wish I could learn to be happy with what I have, instead of hating myself for not being able to be great.

I guess what it all really comes down to is this:  I feel lazy, and I hate myself for being lazy, but I don't know how to make myself be anything else.  And I hate myself for that, too.

+          +          +

Or maybe I'm just depressed because winter is coming, and I'm all out of drugs, and I can feel both of these things gnawing at my bones.

Winter? What Winter?...

I took the day off
for a storm that never came
Fucking weathermen


I'm too tired to write a poem today, unfortunately.  That's the best I could do.  Sorry.

For three days now, the local media has been nothing but coverage of this huge Winter storm we were supposed to get yesterday.  Up to a foot of snow was forecast.  It felt too warm for snow to me, but what did I know?  All the meteorologists were saying the same thing:  expect a huge, crippling snowstorm on Wednesday.

I was looking forward to it, honestly.  We've only had two tiny snowfalls this year, adding up to less than two inches, total.  It always felt like Winter was just around the corner, almost here, any day now.  And then, all of a sudden it was March, and the weather was warm and wet and smelling like the beginnings of new life, and I realized that Winter had never really arrived at all.  And that made me sad; I like Winter.  Just last Saturday night, I said to Her, "I wouldn't mind one more, big snowfall."  And now it seemed that just a few days later, Mother Nature was granting my wish.  So we prepared to take the day off work and hunker down together to have a relaxing, romantic snow-day.

But it never happened.  Twelve hours after the snow started to fall, we had about two inches on the roofs of houses, but that's it.  It wasn't even sticking to the parked cars, much less the sidewalks, much less the roads.  But the forecasters were still saying to expect up to ten inches in our area before the storm tapered off sometime that night.  And then the snow stopped altogether.  But the forecast didn't change.  Then it started to rain, and the little bit of snow that had accumulated on the rooftops began to melt.  But the experts were still saying we would be getting six inches before it was all said and done.  And once all the snow had melted, even the rain stopped.  And then the storm passed over, hours before "they" said it would, and we got a peek of sunset, just before it got dark.

Ever since, the local media has been filled with explanations and excuses for how they could've gotten it so wrong.  The entire region, including large portions of the federal government, shut down yesterday, not because of a crippling snowstorm, but because of the promise of a crippling snowstorm.  A storm that never came.

I was really disappointed.  I still am.  I felt cheated.  I was really looking forward to that experience.  And I feel like I've been waiting for it for years now.  Two years ago we had three major snowstorms, two of them blizzards.  Ten times the amount of snow we usually get.  But we've barely had any snow at all since then; only about three inches total over the last two years.  Which is ten times less than the amount we usually get.  I haven't even gotten my winter coat out of storage the last two Winters; I haven't needed it.  Where the hell has my Winter gone?  When will it come back?  Will it come back?!  I miss it.  I miss the snow.  And I'm tired of waiting for it.  I'm tired of expecting it and never getting it.  I'm tired of Winter disappointments.

Wah wah wah.  Sorry.  Spring's almost here, though, and that's always wonderful.  I'll start trying to look forward to that, instead.

In preparation for Spring, I shaved off my beard and mustache.  I was getting bored with the look, and annoyed by having all that hair on my face.  But now I don't recognize this moon-faced twenty-year old I see in the mirror, and it keeps freaking me out.  I always find that experience rather exhilarating.

Another thing I've been very aware of lately, is that the coming of Spring means hitting my one-year-sober anniversary.  It's less than two months away now.  That's really exciting, for a lot of reasons.  It's also scary for a lot of reasons.

But that topic is a whole post (and probably a few poems) in-and-of-itself, and this one is long enough as it is.  Maybe next time.

Crap Day...

Overslept.

Missed my chance to get in a work out today.  And I need it after this weekend.

Pouring rain, so:

a) stuck in miserable traffic  (why does everyone around here lose their goddamned minds as soon as it starts raining?!  it's fucking rain, people!  not ice, or napalm, or some shit!  you don't need to drive 20mph under the speed limit in the left-hand lane in order to protect your worthless excuse for a life, you miserable slow-ass twats)

b) and therefore late to work (which means I'm stuck here later tonight)

c) and got soaked by rain twice (between home and car, and between car and office - and, of course, because I was late, all the covered parking spots were taken, and the closest parking spot to my office was as far away from the building as physically possible)

Was out of the office yesterday because of Dover, so I came in this morning to find a hernia-inducing pile of work backed-up and waiting for me to finish yesterday.

Between being late this morning and this huge pile of work, there was no way I could justify leaving early to make SMART tonight, so that's my third meeting missed in the last four weeks.

I somehow managed to leave my headphones at home, so I can't listen to music or podcasts or anything else today, the way I normally do when I'm working.

All I've wanted to do, since the moment I opened my eyes this morning, is lay on my couch and play video games.

Wah.

Disappointments & Failures...

How's that for a title, huh?

I was in a pretty good place the last time I wrote here, almost a week ago.  But the past week hasn't gone well for me, and I've swung myself over to the opposite end of the scale since then.

It started when my weekend vacation in the woods didn't work out as anticipated.  I got some writing done (expect to be reading my crappy work off and on for the next week or so), but nowhere near as much as I had wanted.  The mosquitoes and other bugs were simply relentless, so I couldn't do any meditating out in the peaceful forest setting, either, which I'd been looking forward to a great deal.  (We are both covered in itchy, red bites from head to toe now.)  And the hot tub out on the back deck, which is one of my favorite features of this cabin-in-the-woods, and which might've provided some needed respite from the bugs, was broken.  So, while the weather was beautiful, and the setting serene, I couldn't really spend any time outside to enjoy it.  Oh, and somehow, we only managed to have sex once all weekend.  So pathetic.  What a waste.

And to top it all off, after all of these disappointments, combined with all of the stress of getting everything ready for the vacation, and then not being able to find any way to relax once we got there, I ended up succumbing to my addictive desires, and relapsed again.  So much for "looking forward to spending this weekend sober."  I somehow managed to justify it with the fact that I was using a drug I'd never used before, and not one of the ones that I'm currently trying to resist because I've had problems with them in the past.  (Basically, I told myself it was okay to use this drug, because it wasn't alcohol or pot or painkillers, and because I'd never used it before.  Which is such complete bullshit.  Same old pattern I'm trying to break:  avoid using one drug by using another instead.)  I'm not going to name the drug here, but it's legal (or maybe it'd be better to say that it's not yet illegal), and while not actually a painkiller, one of the active chemicals in the plant bonds to the opiod-receptors in the brain, producing the same physical sensation, without most (if not all) of the harmful side-effects of true opiates (liver damage, chemical dependency, respiratory failure, withdrawl, etc.)

So, basically, it's a safe, cheap, legal way to get an opiate-like high.  How the fuck am I supposed to say no to that?!  The horrible, deadly, sickness-inducing side-effects of opiates are what I use to convince myself not to do them in the first place!  Without them, I'm reduced to telling myself, "Well, you shouldn't use it because... well, because you've committed to a year sober and you don't want to feel like a failure.  Oh, and don't forget that if you get high, on anything, at all, you'll end up feeling depressed and lazy and unmotivated and emotionally unbalanced for a week, remember?"

All of which is true, but I couldn't bring myself to give a shit at the time.  And now I'm paying the price.  I just wanted to enjoy my vacation, and I had run out of other options that I could find.  Somehow, sitting around the cabin watching DVDs (two of the three movies we watched ended up being really awful) and snacking (which just made me feel fat - I could feel all of my workouts being undone with every bite) just weren't going to do it for me.   And that's my problem in a nutshell.  I couldn't bring myself to stay sober, knowing that it meant not enjoying myself on my vacation.  Because when I get in a situation where I feel like I need to have a good time, and I try and fail to find any other way to do it, I always know that I've got this sure-fire method right in my back pocket.  And, sure, that shortcut comes with a heavy price to pay, but I can never seem to bring myself to care about that in the moment.  I'm always willing to pay almost any price later to enjoy myself now.

Like I said last week, a lot of what I'm trying to work on right now is learning how to suffer; how to allow myself to be okay with something like having a shitty, sober vacation, rather than feeling like I have to get high in order to avoid it (which only ends up making for a shittier vacation anyways).  And this was put to the test this weekend, hard.  And I failed that test, completely and utterly.

Anyways, then I got home and found out that my wireless had broken, again.  So I had to take the laptop back to the shop and have them fix it, again, less than a week after I got it back from them and spent two days frantically trying to restore all my files and programs.  But before I took it back to the shop I wanted to make another back up, since my previous one is corrupted.  I decided to back-up to disk this time, since every other method I've tried has failed.  After three hours, and three failed attempts, I had to give up on that method, as well.  (I have never, not once in my entire life, successfully backed-up a computer.  Every single attempt I have ever made using any method has failed.  Either it crashes while creating the back-up, or it doesn't restore from the back-up properly.  Why the fuck do I even bother?)

Then the depression from a weekend spent getting high kicked in full-force, and (combined with all of the other things I was already legitimately depressed about) totally knocked me on my ass, and I ended up calling out sick and spending two days on my couch playing video games.  (I am such a fucking child!)  I'm chemically exhausted from the coming-down, and so it takes me hours to get up and out the door in the morning.  As such, I haven't worked out in almost a week, and I know I've managed to completely undo most of the gains I've made with all that hard work in the last month.  I finally managed to make it into work today, but an hour late, only to find out that I missed an important assignment while I was out, and my boss had to take care of it for me.  (I didn't know about it, because I couldn't check my work email, because my computer is still fucking broken!)  Then my boss had a "talk" with me about the fact that I never seem to have any internet at home.  (For years, this was because our building's internet sucked.  And now that we have finally managed to fix that, my computer has been broken for a month!)  And my story of why I never seem to have internet at home sounds ridiculous (even to me, and I know it's true!) so she didn't believe me, and I can hardly blame her.

I skipped SMART last night, because I'm too depressed, and too much of a coward to face all those assholes and admit what a stupid fucking failure I am.  And I skipped my therapist appointment today (which I should be at right now, actually) because I couldn't bring myself to leave work early to go to my appointment, after missing two days and then coming in late today.

So, basically, my vacation sucked, I relapsed, I'm chemically depressed and exhausted, my computer is still broken and back in the shop again, I haven't worked out in a week, I'm way behind and in trouble at work, and I feel like a miserable, worthless, piece-of-shit excuse for a person right now.

And it is ALL.  My.  Fault.

Hunger Pains...

I'm still hungry all the time.  And it's really starting to get on my nerves.

I don't know what's causing this, but it started just after I stopped drinking, so I would imagine it must have something to do with that.  But is it a biochemical reaction?  Meaning, is it my body's autonomic response to being suddenly deprived of the ethyl alcohol it had grown accustomed to?  Or is it a behavioral response?  Is it just my head trying to fill the "Pleasure Yourself" gap left behind when I stopped drinking, with some new, more readily accessible form of pleasure?  I have no idea.

I've heard that a lot of people develop an insatiable sweet-tooth when they quit drinking, because their body is craving the sugar that they used to get from the alcohol.  (Our bodies metabolize alcohol into sugar.)  But that's not what I'm experiencing.  My problem is that I simply never stop feeling like I want to eat.  Normally, I would only get that feeling when I needed to eat.  And then, once I'd eaten, that feeling would go away, until the next time I needed to eat again.  But now, I can eat until I am bloated and feeling sick from the amount of food in my stomach, and I still have that feeling of "I want to eat."  It just never turns off!  And it's so fucking annoying!  It's like when you feel like you have to pee, even though your bladder is empty.  It's just this really unpleasant, uncomfortable feeling that will not go away, and that you cannot do anything about.

And I really, really just want it to stop.

I'm so tired of constantly fighting with myself to keep from over-eating.  I'm so tired of constantly wrestling with this phantom craving.  Every night it's the same thing.  As soon as I finish dinner, I want something sweet.  So, I eat a little dessert, and then as soon as I finish that, I want something salty-crunchy.  If I give in to that craving and eat something salty-crunchy (whole-wheat tortilla chips and 100-calorie packs of cheez-its are my current drugs of choice), then as soon as I finish that, I want something sweet again.  And if I give in to that, then I want something salty-crunchy/savory again.  And that just keeps going on and on forever until I end up passing out face-first into a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels.

I'm currently working out and doing my best to eat as healthy as possible, in an attempt to lose some weight.  And I am losing weight, but much more slowly than I'd like.  And this shit is not making it any easier.

I've been trying to come up with ways to either satisfy and/or curb this craving that do not involve adding a bunch more calories to my daily intake.  Number one on the list is drinking lots and lots of water.  And I mean, to the point where I start to feel full.  That helps some, but not much, because the whole point of that trick is to curb your appetite by making your body feel full; and, of course, my whole problem is that my body is not currently responding correctly to that feeling.  And then there's the further drawback of having my day constantly and repeatedly interrupted by the painfully urgent need to piss violently.  I've thought about lo-to-no-cal snacks like rice cakes, but in the midst of these cravings, I can't bring myself to eat something completely tasteless that I am already well-aware I will not enjoy.  Still, I've found a couple of brands that are mildly tolerable, and I'm planning to try really hard to make them work.  I bought some lo-cal, high-protein jerky, as well, to try and help with the savory cravings.  The trick there is to just chew and chew and chew and chew and chew and chew until either it eventually turns to liquid in your mouth, or you feel like your jaw is going to fall off.  That way you get to spend a lot of time eating and enjoying the pleasure of tasting the salty/savory thing you're craving, but overall you don't actually eat that much food, or take in a lot of calories.  The sore jaw helps to put a damper on the desire to eat more, as well.  And at work, I've been having mid-afternoon Chai Lattes to try and help with my after-lunch cravings.  That seems to be working out ok.  It's not helping my need-to-pee-every-fifteen-minutes problem very much, though.

And there's one solution I've been trying out this week that is a little naughty.

I stopped smoking cigarettes over ten years ago.  And I cannot stand cigars.  But every Fall and Winter for the past six or seven years, pretty much as soon as the weather starts to turn cold, I smoke a pipe.  I really enjoy a good pipe during the cold half of the year.  I love the sweet, rich flavor of the tobacco.  I love its aromatic smell.  I love the ritual of loading, packing, tamping, lighting - everything has to be just right in order for it to work proper, but when it is, and when it does, oh, sweet ambrosia!  I even love the anachronism of it.  My grandfather smoked a pipe.  It just has this old, retro, even ancient feel to it, and I enjoy feeling like a part of that tradition.  And since I don't inhale pipe smoke, I don't have to worry as much about bronchial damage, emphysema, lung cancer, or even nicotine addiction, the way I did with cigarettes.  And since I indulge in it so rarely (even at the height of my smoking during that half of the year, I will smoke, at most, two pipes a day), I don't really have to worry about it much, at all.  It is a rather safe, and pleasurable, indulgence I can allow myself.  Especially compared to all of my other indulgences, which are so many times more harmful and dangerous.

So, it occurred to me, perhaps an after-dinner smoke would fill the void left behind by the absence of my customary after-dinner drink.  And, perhaps also help curb my appetite for my after-dinner snack - and my after-after-dinner snack, and my after-after-after-dinner snack - that is currently replacing my after-dinner drink.  I know, it's still not the healthiest solution in the world, but tasting (not inhaling) a little tobacco smoke is a lot less unhealthy than drinking, or over-eating.  So, I'll take what I can get.  (And everyone needs some sort of vice, don't they?  What's life without at least a little indulgence?)  But the problem is, as soon as the weather starts to warm up, I immediately lose all interest in smoking a pipe.  I don't know what it is, but it has been that way every single year since the very first.  It's not something I'm trying to do, intentionally.  That's just the way it works for me, for some reason.  I always want to smoke a pipe during the cold half of the year, and I only want to smoke a pipe during the cold half of the year.

But on Sunday, I found a solution to this problem.  There's a brand of small "cigars" (or "cigarillos," which is a rather annoying word) that are filled with pipe tobacco.  It's not the greatest pipe tobacco I've ever had, but it still tastes sweet, and smells nice, and it's infinitely better than cigar tobacco.  (I would rather eat old sushi than smoke a cigar.  Ugh!)  So every night so far this week I've smoked at least part of one of these "cigars" after dinner.  And I've enjoyed them alright, but not as much as my pipes.  And they've seemed to help with the cravings a little, but not as much as I'd hoped.  I'd hoped that they would come close to putting an end to the cravings, but I've found that just a little while after putting out the "cigar," I'm hungry again.  Still, the whole time I'm smoking, I don't want to eat.  And the cravings are a lot easier to resist for a while after the smoke.  So, all-in-all, one "cigar" seems to equal about an hour or so of not snacking.  So, it's not as much as I wanted, but it's not nothing, either.  We'll see how it goes.  I'm glad to have something enjoyable to do for now that seems to help at least a little, but I could also see myself getting bored with this very soon.

Alright, that's enough for now.  I'm starting to get hungry.

Time for my Chai Latte.

Waah...

Finally managed to make it out the door early enough this morning to get in a workout, but never actually got to work out.

I've discovered the one major flaw in my otherwise pleasant new backroad commute:  accidents.  On the highway, when there's an accident, it slows everything down considerably.  But even if you're going much more slowly, you are still, at least, going.  But on the backroad, being a mere two-lane, when there's an accident, it shuts down the entire road.  On previous occasions, that has meant a sudden, unexpected detour, sending me off to gods-know-where, to try and find my way around the accident and back to my backroad, without having any clue as to where I am, or how to get where I'm going.  This morning, however, it meant simply sitting in my car for forty-five minutes, not moving, listening to the radio, and watching my average miles-per-gallon tick-tick-tick steadily downwards.

In hindsight, I know that I should've spent that time enjoying the lovely scenery and the beautiful day, taking advantage of the rare opportunity to sit still and take it all in.  After all, there was nothing I could do about it, so what was the point in being upset?  But, honestly, that never even occurred to me.  At the time, all I could think about were my plans and expectations once again being totally screwed up by random chance.  It's becoming apparent that one of the many things I seem to have lost since Walpurgisnacht, is that relaxed, easy-going outlook.  I keep finding myself getting more upset than I used to, more quickly and easily than I used to, and for longer stretches of time.  And this is all very comfortable and familiar to me, because it's who I've been for most of my life.  And while I always knew that my recently acquired state-of-grace wouldn't last forever, I thought it would last longer than it did, and that it would gradually taper off.  I didn't anticipate the possibility that I would bring it to a sudden, and untimely, end.

I don't like this person I am right now very much.  I like the person I've been the past few months a lot more.  I'm very sad to see that person go.  And even more so to know that it was my fault.

But, whatever, never mind, can't beat myself up about that.  Need to try to keep moving forward, and looking on the bright side, if I'm to have any hope at all of getting that version of my Self back again.  So, anyways, by the time I actually made it to the office, I no longer had time to get in a workout.  But I still needed to clean myself up, as I was in my gym clothes and hadn't bothered to fix my bedhead this morning.  (As mentioned previously, I'm going to work out and take a shower anyways, so why should I give a shit if I'm dressed nicely or if my hair is presentable?)  So instead of a workout, I got to enjoy simply going down to the locker room, taking a quick shower, getting cleaned up and dressed, and then coming straight back to my office to start working.

And this was the part of the day I was actually looking forward to and expecting to go well.  The rest of my schedule for the day looks to be no fun at all.  So, here's hoping that I'm just as wrong with all of those expectations, as well, and the rest of my day turns out to be fun and exciting.

But even if not, then oh, well.  There's always tomorrow.

Oh, wait.  Tomorrow's kickball.

So, there's always Friday.