A day in the life II

Item 1: Lovely if short visit with Dad to celebrate his 87th. While he was able to recall another couple of friends visiting, his cycle of telling the same story over and over again was down from his normal 30 – 60 minute cycle to 5 or so. Heard the same story half a dozen times during that visit.
Item 2: Reading Gaiman’s American Gods is doing me a lot of good, reminding me of some of the reasons I live the way I do, some of the ways life unfurls and what I should and should not take personally.
Item 3: Geek: The Apple Remote app was working very sluggishly for me, operations queuing up and executing 30 seconds later on the AppleTV. I reinstalled the Remote app on the iPhone and now it’s working fine. By that I mean on the home screen or in the folder, tap and hold until the icons are shaky and an x appears in the upper left. tap the x, answer yes to the prompt about deleting. Then go to the App store and re-download it.

In starting to seriously come out of my shell, and in getting under way with having Mom live in the Mother-in-law cottage/cabin in the back of the property, challenging myself with owning and maintaining the main house alone, things keep changing, which is fine, and I keep having more maintenance to be responsible for, which is also fine.

Continue reading Ringing the Changes

Life is getting less complicated. House is sold, financial entanglements with Hanne are mostly dealt with. Relationship with J is blossoming. I have a real bed, perhaps I am a Real Boy. Most of the time there is time for feelings. I have changed my address to Berkeley, CA. I am making intentional financial choices instead of making them happen because of the overwhelmingness of circumstance. I am waiting a second, realer bed. I am making choices about the furnishings and maintenance of the ancestral home, starting to really become its owner as Mom has said I was since the moment I really moved in.

Soon I will even have a housewarming party, I think. We’ll see. There’s lots of work still to do, but I’m starting to feel like I’m on the downward slope into being able to relax again.

Maybe soon it will also be time to either figure out how to get to Ba Gua regularly or take up again with Aikido, which I also find myself missing. And also sign up for classes at The Crucible.

I’m getting a lot of unfriendings lately, and I know that part of that is normal and natural for a breakup. But I also know that it feels like the death of a thousand cuts, because in part I measure my worth by how valuable my friends are to me, how much I admire them and how much I like them.

Continue reading I love you like crinkly plastic loves a movie theater (Thoughts and feelings on my split with Hanne)

When we split, when Hanne said she was leaving, moving to Massachusetts, as we negotiated the split (financial, property, what have you), I was inclined to be generous. When I spoke with mutual friends, I was still inclined to be generous, and like any dynamic system, I also had folks who vehemently disagreed. It’s hard to fight with your friends about your ex, hard to fight for doing it the right way, the generous way, the kind way. Some folks who are “on your side” will argue for doing very cruel things. I know they do it out of love. They do it out of love for me and they can’t stand to see me hurting.

Continue reading Breaking up is hard