Personal Journal

Untitled

If the sky was falling, would there be space enough to breathe in?

An excerpt from the book of How Great My Wife Is:
She's home today, and I start summer class this evening after work (Work is in Colorado Springs, school is 80 miles away in Denver downtown). I leave here, head home, change clothes, grab books, go catch the train. Gone from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. this semester (twice a week). It's where my journal is giong later, I suspect.

She texts me a little bit ago and asks if I might like some falafel, hummus, and a pita for a quick dinner between home and train. Uh, yeah! That's one of my favorite meals/snacks!

She knows.

Excerpt ended, sorta.

What she knows is that school is sucking life force from me. It might not be school primarily; it could be the job. The simple matter of the fact is that I cannot place the source of my malaise to any one issue. My life has shrunk into a small space that I can turn around in so as to get different views, but I can't leave, can't lie down and stretch out. Sort of like my experiences in a bath: only half of me can enjoy the warm immersion at a time. The other half detracts from the experience just enough that you know you're not really entirely happy, and in the circumstance, you won't be.

I'm in grad school, since August 2008, the MBA program at UC Denver. Motivation: More career opportunities, more money, more flexibility, more marketability. I never wanted the MBA. I'm punching it out as best I can.

There have been classes I've liked and classes I haven't. There have been things I've been good at and things that I wasn't. There were grades I earned and grades that were gifted to me. I particularly feel a tremendous amount of guilt and shame at the grades I was given, but didn't earn. Fortunately, perhaps, last semester I received a grade below the level I technically earned (a B that should have been a B+ and very well could have been an A-) but I did not argue. I rode the coat tails of my group for the project, and I admitted as much (and am reasonably certain that my group mates reviewed me accurately as being unhelpful) and the Professor gave me a B instead of a B+. Fine. That's some account balancing that I can handle.

Man, where am I trying to go with this entry. I'm fighting it, unable to connect to the skein of emotion I had this morning, and I"m just gonna get out of this. It's not working, and I don't want to sit here and slap keys because I think myself clever.

School starts again tonight, and I need to apply my fucking self for no other reason than to prove to myself that I can do it as an exercise whenever I need to.

I need to fight cynicism, and I need to fight hopelessness, but more than these struggles, I truly and earnestly need to find a way to get my emotions to be self-sustaining and positive. This struggle is the dilemma of my present life, and my ability to manage it has been inadequate such that I have imbibed too many intoxicants and been too isolated from my wife, whom I love more than anyone and who is better to me than any human being ever has.

It has been a sufficiently long and difficult struggle that ultimately leads me to where I am now: questioning whether I possess the requisite skills, knowledge, and capabilities to consider myself a good and right-thinking, productive human being. I am adrift. I am lost. And I don't have the first idea some days if this is the start of a journey to someplace good or if it's the final fits of a person who is about to find out that the height to witch he can rise is very, very low.

Every day, this is what is in my head.
Is the sky falling? Is this a night before a better dawn, or is it the onset of The Road's hopelessness.

I am better off in the weeks without school, I guess. These last 4 weeks were enjoyable, relaxed. Except the two weeks where I had to go without intoxicants in case of screening for employment. That didn't go as well as I would have hoped, leading me to wonder whether that's a problem. Probably not, it's just a difficult time in life and greasing the oil of my emotions has made day to day functioning much easier. In short, yes, I'm using with regularity, but it doesn't seem to be impeding me from reaching goals: indeed, it's helping enable their achievement by virtue of increasing my feeling of contentedness. They give me space to say to myself: This isn't The Road. This is a tempestuous moment, and you, you smart and lucky soul, will be graduating with an MBA in May 2011 when (I like to hope) the job market will be open to such a 42 year old candidate.

I just feel so close to inadequate.
I need a break.
I need a stroke of luck.
And I need to apply myself in school simply because the level of effort I put in to everything in my life is the only thing I can really control.

These are the things I'm doing well:
I'm exercising
I'm maintaining my morale on a daily basis.
I am showing my appreciation to my wife (Laura, by the way).
I'm staying in school
I'm going to work
I am applying to several jobs each week.
I am taking comfort where it is offered.
I am trying to find ways of improvement.

There's a whole issue of atheism to write about, but now is not the time. I just want to step away from this keyboard for a time.



It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn