caught not cheating

in my early educational years, there were plenty of moments i could have been caught behaving in punishable ways. "doing homework with friends" which was a loose translation of "can i copy your homework, i didn't do mine", writing mnemonic devices on my hand for the science test just in case i couldn't remember them under pressure. i did these things from time to time, not often, but enough. usually without teacher or parental detection. i was proud of the fact that i was generally well-behaved and always relieved when i didn't get caught during a temporary lapse. the fact that i didn't get caught when i was bad always made it that much more frustrating when i was accused of cheating when i didn't. is there anything worse in the world than being accused of cheating when you didn't? i don't think so. i still feel the desperation mounting. the tightening in my chest. the clenching of my jaw. the pleading eyebrows. desperation. desperation to be trusted, to be believed. often this kind of desperation can make one downright confessional. "i cheated on the science test, i didn't read the history chapter, i wasn't really sick on art day! but i did NOT copy the bookcover for my book report!" that's what i was accused of. fifth grade again. that teacher hated me. it was straight up public humiliation at every possible opportunity. i was home sick one day and apparently while i was gone, my teacher had decided that since i couldn't paint a bear or draw a gigantic garfield i must not be able to write either. he concluded after reading my book report on "Hollywood Jr. High" (a highly recommended piece of literature from the early 1980's) that i couldn't have written a summary of such quality, therefore i must have copied it off of the back of the book. to add insult to injury, he read my entire book report aloud to my class in my absence, to find out if my peers agreed with his conclusion. to this day, i am angry that he never did believe me. i didn't copy the back of that g.d. book. writing was the one thing i COULD do! at least until 1985.

1985

besides starting and quitting band, 1985 brought to my life plenty of moments of what are best retrospectively acknowledged as "character-building" events. my 5th grade teacher was artistic. this meant we too had to try to be artistic. this also meant, apparently, that if we weren't, we were second-class citizens in the classroom and every day was open season on the artless. i was artless. i had previously suspected it, but lest i have any genuine self-respect left at the end of the school year, my teacher made sure that i knew beyond any shadow of a doubt, that i was as artless as the tree that i couldn't draw. once we had to paint an outdoors scene on a mirror and frame it. i painted a bear on an iceberg. it was a sad and lonely floating bear, but i tried. dimension wasn't my thing. still isn't, really. but as many 10 year old girls trying to protect some shred of ego during the ugly years will do, i must have mumbled my way through the project claiming that i wasn't even trying and that this was a dumb project. the next day, my gray polar bear was on display in the art window outside the classroom next to all the beautifully crafted outdoorsy-type paintings. it was parent-teacher conference week. i scowled at my teacher when i entered the classroom and he said, "that's what happens when you don't even try." i think i managed to not cry in front of him. i think i even laughed. of course, i had painted the best gray polar bear i knew how to paint, and i walked away thinking he really put it in the window because he likes it, he was only teasing me because he knew i said i wasn't trying. oh, the fallacies we'll create in the name of self-protection. i faked stomach pain on every art day thereafter. that is, until the stomach pain became real, then i just stayed home and read books. i read a lot of books.

truly talentless and too late

the more i ponder the skills and hobbies that could have been, the more intimately aware i become of my painfully uninteresting self. yesterday i was looking through my friend kim's childhood scrapbook and she had pictures of herself doing all kinds of activities and exhibiting numerous talents. i lacked the staying power to have acquired such a scrapbook. band, girl scouts (okay, admittedly, i am not really that sad to have never been a girl scout. but i do love the cookies), big dresses and crowns and pompoms... none of this was my world. how boring. i did try to be in band once. i was in 5th grade, i was afraid of my teacher and band lessons seemed like a good way to get out of class for a while. my mom played flute when she was young, so i chose the flute. there were plenty of problems going in...i didn't have any real understanding of music or musical concepts. melody, harmony, pitch, tone... to this day i honestly cannot define even one of those terms. there is also a very good chance that i am tone deaf. and i could never get over the idea that my breath was trapped inside my flute and i could never REALLY clean it entirely. this serves as a good segue into the most problematic factor in the flute fiasco. when i would go to lessons, there were at least three of us playing together at a time. three chairs, side by side by side. unless one was on the far left of the threesome, which, try as i might, i never seemed to be able to do, one was guaranteed to have someone else's flute tip in one's face for the entire 30 or 45 minutes. i took issue with this. i was trying to learn what "notes" are and how to make them happen from this long silver tube with buttons, but all i could really think about was how much i wanted to throw up because i could feel the humid air coming from the end of the flute to my left. that meant someone's breath was RIGHT THERE blowing in my face. the issue compounded because of the fact that in order to breathe when fluting, one must take a quick, gasping-like breath through the mouth. this meant that the foreign breath molecules that were in front of my face, lingering, were also being quickly and forcefully thrust into my own lungs, THROUGH MY MOUTH!!! by the end of flute lessons, i would swear that i could taste the breath of the person next to me. AND flute lessons were after lunch, so there were food odors and probably particles being absorbed into my own body and there was nothing i could do to stop it. breath anxiety is truly my only memory of band. i had to quit. i didn't even make it to the first concert. mostly because i hadn't learned the music, but i pretended to be sick. i got to quit the day after i skipped the first concert. i think my parents acted disappointed, but i know my father well and i am sure that he was much happier to practice basketball in the driveway with me than to listen to me practice the flute while he tried to watch smokey and the bandit or wheel of fortune.

AA

now it is time to talk about adult acne. it is time because i haven't before and i get to make the decisions since i am the person with the password to open the dashboard. normally, if someone were to use a phrase like "adult acne" i would cringe at the unnecessary adjective. like when someone is clearly referring to an encounter between two men and they refer to it as "gay sex". it's two men, just call it sex! we understand the rest! i especially take issue when there is a clear sexist implication in the excess adjective: "lady cop", "woman lawyer", "girls' hockey". i guess "cop" "lawyer" and "hockey" when they stand alone must have facial hair and are more likely to bald in a patterned sort of way. i think i will start using phrases like "man teacher" or "boy honor student". that's funny. anyway, i digress. back to adult acne. the added adjective in this case doesn't bother me because, although it may be true that "acne is acne" just as a lawyer is a lawyer and hockey is hockey, there is something so saddening and aggravating about having acne as an adult that definitely sets it apart from acne as a general concept. when i was a spotted teen, it sucked and i was self-conscious about it, but it was normal and everyone expected it. there were the few, proud, beautiful teens who had perfect skin from birth into adulthood, but let's face it, we hated them and everyone knows they can't really relate to other people's pain because they have never been embarrassed by their appearance. they were robbed of the gift of empathy. most of us had at least a couple of good speckled years. i have now had at least 18 of those years. DAMMIT! how unfair is that!? 18 years of freaking clearasil and sea breeze. that's not right. here's what else isn't right, the shit doesn't even work. i use it every day and the 28 day cycle of acnebursts hasn't freakin' budged. i have had to switch to the generic target brand, the kind that says in tiny print at the bottom: "compare to sea breeze" with a little c in a circle. i could probably have bought a house or two with the amount of money i have spent on trying to contain the skinrage. no wonder i am so poor. perfectly complected people probably have two more houses than i do and i bet they aren't in debt, either! pretty people suck. but only tonight because i have a gross red growth on my right temple and i can feel it as i type this. when it goes away pretty people and the rest of us will be the same again.

black-eyed dreams

on saturday morning i woke to my alarm clock at 6:30, rousing me from a wicked awesome dance revolution at target. i freakin' love dreams. just before i had to wake and face the day, i was trotting and shakin' it to one of my newest favorite guilty pleasure songs. it went a little something like this. i am walking through supertarget quietly and methodically, alone. suddenly, over the store intercom system i hear: "i drive these brothers crazy i do it on the daily, they treat me really nicely..." without warning the dance craze of the century erupts all around me and everyone is trotting throught the aisles performing exactly the same dance and singing along. naturally, since this is my dream, i knew the dance and joined in. then i realized that i am not alone after all...i look toward the checkout lines and there are two of my best friends from grad school, nikki and bec! i pull them out of line and shout enthusiastically, "COME ON!! LET'S DANCE!" so the three of us dance and sing our way into a part of the store where we were apparently going to buy ourselves a freezer. i wish that i had a camera so i could include a short clip of myself performing the dream dance. it really is quite a thing to see. and incidentally, all of the parts of "my humps" that i don't know in my real awake life, no one knew in my dream life. there were just a lot of mumbles at those times. i freakin' love dreams.

un-bright child

i was just pushing the last few coffee beans into the grinder (sometimes they get stuck in the chute) when i had this terrible vision of my fingers getting mangled in the blades and pulling out this bloody mess of what was once my dominant hand. i don't know why these kinds of thoughts plague my mind, but i have a strong tendency toward vivid visualization that is often completely out of control. i think it is related to my anxiety that all bad things that can happen probably will if you don't think it through all the way. i got this gift from my mother. and, i think, my genetics. it started early. anyway, with this disgusting image of my bloody hand came the very real memory of the time that i sharpened my little finger in an electric pencil sharpener. this is a true story. i got so interested in this new household device that i locked onto it and lost all reason and practicality. i remember it distinctly. i found myself wondering how far one has to penetrate the device before the swirling of the blades is triggered. i did not find myself remembering that once triggered, there are in fact, blades swirling. so, watching carefully, concentrating intently i slowly lowered my pinky finger (which was small enough to fit so i must have been quite young) into the hole in the top of the sharpener. where is the trigger spot? what makes it "know" that i want it to sharpen? well it all happened too fast to get a clear answer to those questions. there definitely is a trigger spot, as previously presumed. the blades definitely do sharpen. i did in fact hit the trigger and the tiny gouges out of either side of the tip of my little finger were quite the topic of conversation around my household for some time. i think my parents told that story until the embarrassment level of that situation was trumped by the time that i was daydreaming in the car one day with my head lying against my arm and i chewed on a spot on my right biceps for so long that i gave myself a hickey. i didn't even know what a hickey was but i had determined by the fact that my mother always whispered when she said it that it was the kind of thing that a child does not want to do to one's self. she also made me wear a band-aid over it. then she told every person she saw all about it anyway. WTF? so there it is. two dumb things. two band-aids. hours of family entertainment.

who's your what?

i have finally come to a place in my life where i am comfortable admitting that i have once again become something of a television junkie. there is so much fascinating and addicting programming these days i can't help myself. court tv, all of the law and orders, 200 pound tumors on discovery health...who can resist!? not this girl. but there is a line. still. last night i witnessed something that so dramatically obliterated the line that the line may never be seen again. we were surfing for something to bring us out of the funk that "saw" had left us in and we scrolled past reality tv. already a nightmare of a channel and one that is never selected in our household. i have always considered reality tv an excellent barometer for the obscenity and hypocrisy of our fine nation. deny it if you will, but i will never believe that this country's refusal to acknowledge the validity of my relationship is based on some kind of shared civic value that is not so much more desecrated by "who wants to marry my dad?" (god i have got to move away from this place!!!) anyway, that's a whole different rant. this morning's rage is reserved for a television show called "who's your daddy?" yes. i didn't make it up... i COULDN'T make it up. on this brilliant sample of exploi-tv, a young woman who is adopted at birth is confronted with several different men who are claiming to be her birth father. (i swear i am not making this up) apparently she spends some amount of time with each of these men and sustains the on-going trauma of not knowing combined now with the possibility of meeting several different men who, in the end, she may have wished had been her father but she will now just have to settle for genetics and hope that the X number of voyeuristic viewers (not to mention her actual biological father) did not witness the expression of disappointment on her face when the truth is revealed. for her trouble, apparently this poor sap can WIN 100,000 dollars. but only if she guesses right. i can't even begin to express my disgust. take me to temptation island any day if this is my other option! jan selected "who's your daddy" and let the filth play for a few minutes with a disturbed and stunned kind of expression on her face. eventually i said, "really, you have to turn this off." she did, and then she turned to me and said, "honey, you should go on there. win us some money!" isn't she precious? who knew that last night's television viewing held in store for me something more disturbing than "saw"?

arts and crafts

yesterday i was home with a sore throat and an overall sensation that was threatening to become one of those flu-like illnesses that makes one's body ache all over so much that it's impossible to roll over without moaning. thankfully, with enough tylenol and water and rest, that didn't happen. anyway, since i was home alone, i decided that a fun thing to do would be to take out the clay that i purchased for myself a few weeks ago at the craft store. keeping in mind that my thoughts about being a sculptor are settled firmly in the realm of fantasy and that any attempts to play with clay could be only for the sake of doing something rather than nothing and this was something i could do without having to get off the couch- the real goal of the day. i took out the block of clay yesterday afternoon and by late last night, there was a tv tray in my living room that one could say is indistinguishable from the drying table any elementary school arts and crafts center. (assuming of course that any elementary schools still have them) it is pathetic. fun. but pathetic. my shabbily formed little creatures lie so helplessly and lifelessly on dusty ziploc bags...wishing for a way out but knowing that with each passing moment of exposure to the air, their fates are becoming that much more sealed. never will those particular molecules of clay have a chance at becoming something real or special or beautiful. just cracked, twisted, flat little objects with no real suggestion of inspiration. when i get home i will whisper to them that a 7-year-old made them. that should help a little.

disturbed

monday morning i woke up from a dream that was so disturbing and upsetting to me that i immediately tried to justify to myself the presence of such horrible imagery in my own head. i tried to convince myself that it wasn't that bad, that the content of the dream was relatively mild and only my feelings about it were so intense. i knew i was lying, so i moved on from that task. then i decided that the plot of my dream would make a good SVU episode and i thought that perhaps i should write it down. perhaps my true calling was emerging in my dreams. i dream disturbing things then i write them down and i become a mystery author. that thought was followed quickly by the concern that it would be far too telling or humiliating to reveal that i have the capacity to generate this kind of plot, consciously or subconsciously. that led to a long pondering of the authors of such disturbing media. how embarrassing, i thought. to put your name on such disgusting filth and proudly proclaim "it was my idea to have the antagonist rip the fetus out of the murdered rape victim!" (a real SVU plot, i didn't make that up) i wondered if the people who knew these writers as children are thinking, "wow, he's more fucked up than i thought!" or if the current friends and family think that perhaps someone with such thoughts isn't safe on the streets and perhaps should be locked up in a mental institution. (it would be just freakin' poetic for me to find my calling and have it lead to a long-term institutionalization.) all of these thoughts came rushing back and were absolutely confirmed for me last night when i watched the movie "Saw". i don't care who you are, that shit's just sick. i spent much of the movie with my hands over my face, to protect myself from the television, of course. but the parts that i did see caused me to pause the movie (god bless tivo) somewhere in the first 45 minutes and say to jan, "who thinks of this!?!?!" at this point we took a break from the movie in a feeble attempt to shake some of the grotesque imagery from our minds. i, of course, had to initiate a discussion about my concerns. "that character is unthinkably evil. what does that say about the person who created the character?" who has the capacity to invent such torturous devices? are they in a mental hospital? have they ever been? it should be considered. but in the end, i have to admit, i thought it was a good movie. what does that say about me?

brokeback

i tend to be very particular and exclusive about the movies i watch. especially the movies i watch in the theater. and for good reason. most of the movies that are released on mainstream cinema screens aren't worth the 78 cents that my $12.00 snacks actually cost. bubble gum teen movies and toilet humor starring saturday night live cast members are not my idea of a quality night on the town. so i avoid them. i choose carefully what i subject myself to in 2-hour time blocks. as a result, my cinematic experiences are always either hilariously entertaining or profoundly moving. last night's movie outing raised the bar. jan and her mother and i went to Brokeback Mountain. if you haven't seen it, do. if you have seen it and didn't like it, then you and i have nothing in common. while i think there is a place for the over-the-top queer genre that wraps itself up neatly at the end of 2 hours with a previously disapproving family attending a pride parade, focus films rightly leaves that storyline to the lifetime movie network and does something entirely different and real and tragic and beautiful.

secretly and tidily situated in the enormity of (what i assume to be) the canadian rockies, this love known only to the two people who share it, becomes as majestic and ineffable as the setting in which it begins. this story is told in the same silence that contains the love of ennis and jack. rare are the moments of outburst and wild emotion, and as such, they are that much more effective. rarer still are the scenes of homophobic violence and hate crimes. this story is about the silence of forbidden love. it tells the story of the very real experience of invisibility and rejection. throughout the film, at least three supporting characters are aware or hint at awareness of the love between ennis and jack. none of them speaks of that awareness explicitly. not even to ennis or jack. there is no "outing" of the characters, because in this context it would be more embarrassing for the person who publicly identifies their knowledge of the love than it would be for the men who share the love and have a substantially deeper understanding of it. and this points to one of the most impressive elements of the characters. neither of them is personally embarrassed by their love. confused at first, angry that this is happening to them, but not embarrassed. they simply recognize that it is not an option. and both of them simultaneously carry on a permissible life. this is a homophobia that stings to the core of human existence. the message is not that one will not be accepted if one divulges his persuasion. the message is that this love is so deeply rejected that there exists no language to name it or express it. the fragile counterbalance to this refusal to identify the relationship between ennis and jack is that their love, from the perspective of the affirming on-looker, is so pure and so intense that it does in fact elude language. this story reflects a truth that thankfully so many of us will never know in its fullness. no one lives happily ever after, there is no declaration of lifelong commitment uttered between two passionate lovers. there is silence and pain and loss and love too powerful to need exclamation. and it all happens quietly under the vast shadow of compromise and survival tucked neatly in the green valleys and tiny towns at the foothills of the rockies.

opportunities lost?

i don't know if this is a turning 30 thing or a deep in debt thing, but alternative life directions have become the focus of nearly all of my free fleeting thought time. strangely, i don't fantasize about a different job RIGHT NOW or a different life partner EVER or even a different geographical location FOR NOW, i just keep finding myself dreaming of paths i could have taken and directions i abandoned and wondering how much better all of this could be if i had persevered. i am not a perseverent kind of person. funny, too, because i think many of my close aquainatances at different times in my life would have thought so. but i am not. i am a quitter and a phobe. i know that isn't a word all by itself, but it applies to so many parts of my existence that i think i deserve to just use it as a descriptive noun to refer to myself. i am not sure why i become so afraid, but i do and there is no looking back. and then there is just the quiet torture of shame and denial. how did this happen to me?

this post is really supposed to be about all of the talents i fantasize about having, so let's move on to that. i can't stop myself from believing that i have a deeply-rooted talent for things like... sculpture. with the exception of a poorly proportioned but symmetrical penguin that i made out of clay in 7th grade, i have never sculpted anything. but i apparently have to believe that i could if i tried. i think i just have a deeply-rooted NEED for talent. or the illusion of such. for a few weeks in 2004 i had convinced myself that if i tried really hard i could be a pastel artist. i met a wonderful woman who is a pastel artist and she offered to show me her technique. so i chose to believe that i could do it too. i never tried. and she hasn't yet shown me (because of my tendency toward avoidance) but i thought for a while that i was supposed to have been an artist. when i was a young child i was given much positive feedback on my school writings. so occasionally i have believed that if i only had enough information on a given topic and a commitment to something specific, i could have been a writer had i continued to hone those skills. my recent new-found obsession with my gym membership and "numbers" has brought me to lament about missed opportunities in body-building/fitness competition. if only i had started younger and continued then... if only i had discovered before that i had a predisposition for this... the reality, humorous and a little sad, is that i have none of these talents and i never did. and likely never will. (note*"likely" i still have to hold on to something!) but i dream of them. i even gave up on my academic life and that was the one thing i actually was good at! there are some things that i know i could do well that are more realistic. i would be a good adolescent counselor. i would be a good professor. in a parallel universe, i would even be a good mechanic. or pediatrician. but having made all of the choices hinted at in the first paragraph, none of these things are an option anymore. how did this happen? does it drive jan crazy? it must. she must be a very good person for staying with me despite my inability to do anything real. should i worry about this? i'll choose not to until she gives me reason to decide otherwise. there must be some kind of resolution, but apparently the ability to find that resolution is not among my many "talents".

a christ figure and an old house full of sky-divers

i had a dream just before i woke up this morning. in this dream i had stolen a van from a very large man. i knew the man very well in my dream but he is no one real in my life. i stole his van and drove it 200 miles to my home. my home was somewhere near my real life home in minnesota, but the van route included a long highway that stretched high over manhattan. i was driving the van and looking down on the city. specifically i was looking for a gas station. the van was running out of gas i guess. i had no particular feelings about the van while driving over the city but later i had to confess to the man that i had stolen his van and i felt just awful about it! like worse than i have ever felt about anything in my awake life. i cried and cried and wailed out my apology to the man. i offered to drive the van back to the man's house and walk home. a 200 mile walk at this point in my dream, NOT over manhattan. the man only smiled and hugged me and said that he knew i had the van and that he was not mad. he knew i would bring it back. by the time he said this, i had a friend in the front seat of the van who was drunk and apparently had called the van owner earlier and told him we had stolen the van. the drunk person disappeared shortly after that, and suddenly the van wouldn't start. i felt even worse. had i broken the van? the man still didn't care and seemed to have some kind of magic fix for his van. and he was still smiling gently at me. then i was suddenly in an old house with a person who hated it because he was not the kind of person who appreciates things like old houses. to leave the old house one was required to scale up or down a slippery hill and this added to my companion's distaste for the experience. one of my good friends (who also happens to be a former professor from my college years) was there with her husband, also my friend. soon after they showed up, i learned that we were running late for our sky-diving gig. when i heard this i became very frightened. i was afraid to jump out of the plane and this was upsetting and confusing to me because my real-life sky-diving experience sneaked into my dream and i remembered not being afraid last time, but this time i wanted to run away and hide because the idea was so terrifying. i didn't want to disappoint becky-the idea had been hers apparently and something about the dive was some kind of a gift to me so i had to go. in the street way below the old house there were people milling about having some kind of celebration that looked like new year's eve in antigua, guatemala. i planned to slide down the hill and join the party but i woke up before i made it out of the house. and i was very sad that becky wasn't there but very relieved that i hadn't actually become afraid of sky-diving.

another secret

post secret is truly one of the great delights of my week. humanity stripped of its face, name, identity and all things indicating accountability is fascinating. and endlessly disturbing. the weekly posts are my one moment of insight into the deepest agonies of complete strangers and thus, i conclude, also some of my own acquaintances. one can't go about assuming that the sickness and sadness of humanity is more than 3 degrees separated from one's own existence, right? if there are so many torutured souls all over the world, i must assume some of them are closer than i know. but i think that even among my closest friends, if i were to suggest that we share a conversation about our deepest secrets, (i.e. if you were to write to post secret, what would you reveal?), one of two things would happen. less likely: i would learn some very intense and horrible things about my friends; more likely: everyone would lie and make their "secret" quite benign.

this week's posts don't disappoint.

i am unsure of the issue of image rights with the post secret blog, so i will not be posting any of the pieces here, but i want to discuss one post card in particular. perhaps i shall email frank and ask him if i can borrow his images for the purpose of regular commentary. until then, clicking on the link will have to suffice.

"i gave up a child for adoption 25 years ago. she found me. i wish to god i had had the abortion instead." ~reads one of this week's cards. this was one of those post secret experiences that stops me dead and punches me in the chest. growing up with the regular adopted child mythologies like: "your mommy wanted you to have a good home" "she just wanted what was best for you" "she wasn't ready" "she loved you enough to know that she couldn't keep you" "she wanted you, she just didn't have enough money to raise you" blah blah blah, one becomes accustomed to the assumption and pure conjecture that anyone around knows anything about what this woman whom no one has met, was thinking. and they mean well, so we let them use their pacifying prefabricated tales. and when we grow up, we don't mention that we knew they were full of shit. we just continue on with the myth. for adoptive parents the entire concept is one that remains in the past. a long time ago, we got this baby because someone else didn't want this baby and now it is done. over. fin. some adoptive parents (if they are completely honest with themselves) probably have a few moments in which they think to themselves: why did we do this? i don't want this child either. and that is okay too. it's natural, we're just glad they keep that information from us. and for adopted kids, the entire event takes place in the past and the distant future. before, i was given up by my bio mom. some day, i might meet her. sometimes some day comes, sometimes not. and both parties, the kids and the adoptive parents, kind of ignore that there is another party involved in this triad. many of us never speak about the details or the emotions because it taps too many strong feelings that can't really be explained or resolved and the conversation just becomes incredibly uncomfortable. that, too, is okay. kids can find other people who are able to speak comfortably and listen without feeling threatened. the concept that is never addressed by the adoptive family is that the emotion and the impact continues into the present and future for the biological mother. it had never even one time occurred to me that a biological mother in an adoption triad would regret giving birth 25 years later. the adopted child's fantasy is that they will one day meet their bio mom and she will say " i wish i had never given you up! i love you! everything they told you was untrue, i never stopped wishing that you would come back to me someday!" but the meeting that leads to a secret like the one on post secret this week... i have honestly never even considered the possibility. for obvious reasons, probably. who would ever want to think about that?

i was going to go to my adoption agency and request contact info paperwork this week, assuming that i might go through with the search this time. i think i will put that on hold for now. i have to prepare for a whole new scenario. it's one thing to prepare for years for the news that your bio family still doesn't want to know you. it is another thing entirely to find out they wish you had never been born at all. still. that news carries a sting that i am not ready for just yet.

70 percent

i am back from all of my holiday travels and am proud to report that i am functioning at approximately 70% after my unfortunate collision with the frozen earth. i returned to work today and that felt very good. i miss it and i am ready to be back. it's hard to be on the inactive injured list when you genuinely like your job! that's probably how Daunte feels too.
anyway. after 12 days with my family in phoenix, 21 days off of work and 17 days away from the gym, i have so many thoughts, ideas, frustrations, joys and slightly off-kilter perceptions to share that i can't even focus myself well enough to think of a reasonable way to start catching up. my parents and my brother are always effective newsmakers, but i have to ponder for a few days in order to decide just how honest and reflective i want to be on those subjects. i am not in the blog business to hurt anyone. but i am in the business of ranting about things that piss me off. we'll see how that comes out. i haven't decided yet. i may need a more anonymous forum for all of that.
for now i think i will sign off by saying that i have alot to share and i am still a few weeks out from normal.