Very Good Day

This is my third attempt to write a blog for this week.

The first attempt was a boring and dismal failure, talking about the death of my old computer and getting a new one. Big news in my life, but not really the stuff folk want to read about. I was kinda proud of it, too. It had links to the computer's specs and it talked about how annoying (humiliating) it is for me as an an IT professional, (after a fashion. If you squint real hard at my job) to know nothing about Windows 7 - not even enough to know which version I would need for what I do.

Boring. I still wanted to write about it and I still might, if I can find a way to make it remotely interesting to the rest of you.

The second was about responsibility. A bit philosophical, but boring.

Instead, I'll tell you about my Very Good Day and my Very Good News.

The Very Good News is that by the time I get this posted, I will have been dating (officially) my girl for six months. Yay us! Truth to tell, I never thought I would write something like that every again. But, there it is. Just goes to show that things can work out way more awesome than I think they can.

And before you go hide under your desk from my flood of words, I'm not going to give you a 'how we met' story. Seriously overrated, writing those down. Especially since this one is a lot of me banging my head on my desk saying "Bad me. No treat. Cannot has girl."

When, in reality, I could have. And do.

No. It is today that was very good.



It didn't start that way. I closed the store on Saturday night, which is, in and of itself, not a terrible thing. My girl was closing with me and we had a really cool co-worker closing with us. And I didn't have to do a lot of the painful manual labor, just the painful mental labor. Considering it's been a good long while since I had a regular closing shift, it's kinda my turn.

No, it's not closing. It's waking up the next morning and crawling out of bed early enough to go to church. This is hard enough as it is, because I so rarely have the chance to sleep in that missing church for a bit of extra sleep is really tempting. But I got up and I hated myself for it.

I hurt this morning. I cannot tell you how much I hurt this morning. Everything ached. Including things that haven't been aching lately. I could barely walk; I stumbled around, got dressed and staggered out the door. I've been missing too much church lately, I missed my friends and damn it, I was going to go!

I picked up my girl from her place and we went to pick up my brother, but he was more dead than she and I were, so he stayed home. We went to church, foregoing breakfast. The effort to procure it seemed insurmountable. Insanely so. The effort of parking. Getting out. Walking in someplace. Deciding what to eat - yeah, no. To say nothing of getting back in the car and driving to church only to have to get out again.

Sarcastic? Me? Never. Perish the thought.

Thankfully, some kind and wonderful soul had brought doughnuts. I threw some money in the breakfast pot and had a couple. I also drank the Monster I had with me and wrote a bit, listened to the fun sermon, in which the pastor dressed up like a mad scientist and even had a fake mad science/Late Night TV Product gizmo as part of his demonstration. As I'm nominally on the web/PR team for the church, I valiantly crawled out of my nice, comfy chair and took some pictures. Not that I did that well, really - I couldn't get the flash to turn off until the very last picture.

Yeah. I should have RTFM closer. Because it's my camera.

By the time I left church, I'd been hugged by half a dozen kids, talked to a bunch of people I missed and I didn't hate the world as much. I headed from church out to a very successful meeting with a co-worker where we planned out quite a bit of a project we're both involved in and came up with a couple of new ideas the boss really liked. We made a lot more work for ourselves, but - I think, in the long run, it was a good thing.

Then off to see the Seth Rogen Green Hornet movie.

What a fucking waste of time and money. It was even worse than Scott Pilgrim, if you can believe it. Seth Rogen didn't even try to play Britt Reid. He just played a slightly more heroic version of most of his characters - dumb, lazy, and none too entertaining. They butchered the story and played merry hob with the characters I love (except for Lenora Case. Cameron Diaz was awesome.)

Look - I bet the movie isn't really that bad, just based on the merit of me hating it. But I don't like buddy movie comedy. I don't like parody movies very often and I hate awkward situational humor where the entirety of the joke is one guy is being an ass.

The good part of the day? My girl. She is incredibly supportive of me in so many ways. If you've been reading me long, you know I have an obssession with 'getting stuff done.'

Well, the reason for that is for about two or three years there, I didn't. I just didn't. I sat around on my ass, played forum RP, read and wrote fanfic and tried to figure out my life through the zen art of doing absolutely shit. I wrote a lot of stuff that's pretty much nothing more than extravagant practice, honed my skills at being an online GM for a bunch of geeks who can't let go of dead fandoms and didn't really advance my life much.

Now, I'm playing catch-up from those few years. To be honest, a lot of what I have to do isn't fun. Some of it is learning writing discipline again. (Which is why I'm forcing myself to write this terrible entry, even though it's terrible.) Some of it is just slogging through all the crap I've got to get rid of. I did a lot of that the last two years, but there's still the garage and there's still too much crap in my room.

Some of it is just learning not to leave little things and a lot of it is learning to be better about taking care of little thing - email responses, review responses, writing/calling/responding to people. The end result is I have a long list of projects that have just sat there, and I have tried to make myself get through them from time to time. I start to make progress - I really do - and then I just go back to sitting.

I could blame it on the fibro and the fatigue that comes with it, and while that is a factor, it is not the major one. I could blame it on busy schedule and on priotizing thing, but that wouldn't be really honest, either. I could take the tried and true road and call it a 'combination of factors' or some other bullshit.

Yeah. Not really. I just stop and end up just sitting, staring at my computer and watching the list of crap I have to do grow.

The real problem? I needed help. I needed just a little bit of help to get moving and keep moving. My girl is givng me that help. She's being supportive, affectionate, attentive and is even willing to just sit on my bed and watch TV or play Pokemon while I trudge through the morass of crap I've let build up.

She's read my writing and is encouraging me to write more without nagging. She's willing to sit with me while I sort through things and willing to help me clean out things and willing to help me do some of the crawling around on the floor or moving around of things (despite being very tiny, she's rather tough) that is hard on me physically.

That little bit of help has me moving forward at an accelerated pace. Even before we were actually dating, he helped me a lot - tagging along on errands, helping me in the day-to-day organizing, etc. Just having her there makes it easier for me to do and makes even the most annoying and frustrating errands bearable and sometimes even fun.

And before some of you throw down the line about the 'shiny wearing off' - she's been helping me like that for more than a year now, and the shiny hasn't worn off yet. I know lots of couples who have been married decades who still like to do stuff like that together, just to be together.

So nyah, naysayers. I'd stick out my tongue at you, but you wouldn't see it.

She made today awesome, because even though I was hurting, she helped me slog through what needed to be done and a lot of what I wanted to get done.

When I set up my new computer, I looked at my to-do list and I realized that I had made a lot of progress in the last year. I finally realized how much progress when I realized I was actually starting to look some of the big, nasty projects in the face.

And for once, I'm staring right back at them.

So that's my good day. A day spent being productive and being with my girl and going to bed feeling like it's okay to go to bed for the first time in a long time.