one hell of a week
no promises on the quality of this one.
I’m sitting here trapped under an avalanche of a hangover after one of the strangest weeks in recent history. The hangover is all on me and my questionable decision making but that is a story for another day. I will just say that I had an unofficial tryout for a kind of drinking team and despite the way I feel this morning I think I’ve got a fallback if my other pursuits fall through.
A close friend tried to die at an all company meeting to start the week. I’m not going to violate anymore privacy by writing down details but I truly love her and this really scared me. I don’t scare easily and my feelings are hard to access especially after the events of recent years but I caught myself in an unusually vulnerable state. During a work event no less. Everything turned out great and she even managed to crack me up in the midst of the whole thing by asking the paramedics as they were loading her on to the stretcher if she could take an Uber and meet them at the hospital to save money. That’s when I knew she would be okay.
Next up an old friend died. He and I had a rocky relationship to say the least but no one deserves to suffer through the levels of addiction that he experienced. I worked for his company at one point in my career and the problems we had were around his asshole partner who was taking the business down. His behavior at the time was the least of my worries but its ultimately what took him off the planet. No matter what, someone you are or were close with passing gets in your head.
Then, I received my annual review. The nicest thing I can say is it was odd. I’ll be fine and this was nothing that is going to trigger an immediate life change but it’s true that people don’t quit companies, they quit managers. I feel like I’m writing about a bunch of things that I can’t fully disclose but this was the swirling mess that made up my week. I started to think that the best thing about this week is its over but that’s not true.
I have been journaling every day for a while now on the advice of a professional. The first part is a five minute brain dump that helps me filter the noise in my mind. Once that is complete I challenge myself to write down three gratitudes. So this morning as I was waiting for the pain killers to kick in I reviewed the gratitudes for the week. Most of them were around conversations with family and friends. I have people in my life who just check in and that is a powerful thing. If you’re not doing that with the people you love start immediately. (okay, I’m powering down hungover-life-advice-guy for now)
My living space shows up in my gratitudes quite a bit. I have a rule that I only put things on my walls that make me happy. In the last couple weeks I had a college friend reach out and share that someone was selling watercolor prints of a bar in Ames where I worked. I don’t know when she painted it but I bought one immediately. Now that its on my wall it makes me smile at least one a day.
I should explain that but this post already feels long to me… oh well. I like it a little cooler in my apartment. Winters here are already dry and forced air heat makes it worse. In the dead of winter it feels like I’m living in a food dehydrator. I tell you that to explain why I try to never turn the heat on if possible. I live almost dead center in a cube of apartments so the laws of thermodynamics allow me to wait longer than most when its time to heat this place up.
That was a long way to explain why that picture makes me smile so much. Its cold outside and in fact I woke up to this…
But it’s in the upper mid sixties in my house with the heat off. Holy crap I just realized that I’ve been rambling about home temperature thus turning into my parents on this computer in front of my eyes. I need to stop now but before I go I will leave you with the print that started me down this trail.
