1hr Exercise - Optimism

Today I looked back at my old blog entries from four and five years ago. They seem to be written by a stranger.

I was looking for the actual date my brother died in a car wreck. I knew the year, just not the day of the month. August 20, 2006, by the way. It's funny, I use my blog to find dates on just about anything big that's happened to me over the years.

Like visiting Virginia for the first time, moving, finding out Kasey was pregnant. I used to write a lot so it was easy. Even as the updates become more and more sparse they still serve as a sun dial for when things occured. I wouldn't have been able to fill out the grueling application for a Top Secret clearance without it.

I read a couple posts before and after his death to see if there was a noticeable change. The Before Writing and the After Writing. From the limited sample I chose I couldn't really see a difference, although friends and family said I was changed afterwards. I think they were just upset with the actions I was taking. Like leaving my wife and significant other of eight years and flying across the country every chance I got to see a girl I'd just met.

I didn't feel any different at the time, but looking back I can see that something was stripped away from me. Not stolen, but cut off. Like fat from a steak. I want to say it was fear, but it wasn't that. Maybe some of my ability to care, care what other thought about me. I think back now and recognize the sudden knowledge that I needed to stop wasting time and do what I wanted to be happy.

Which is how I ended up here, in Virginia, with a redhead and the prettiest being I've ever seen. So I guess it worked out, although some of that fat has grown back, but in very specific places.

My writing in the early 2000's accurately reflects who I was then: Naive, excited, almost hopelessly optimistic, in love with life. Even vinegar was pleasant. While I quietly lament the loss of much of the lucidity of my emotions and experiences from that time, I don't think I would chose to go back. I do miss the sharpness of it all, though. My emotional life was full and dramatic, the way it is in high school. Everything meant something, it was all magic and life and death. Now life comes to me through a lens that's been scuffed over the years to a dull matte that removes a lot of the vibrancy. It seems ignorance is bliss, at least for me.

My brother's death affected me deeply, but barely put a scratch in my youthful exuberance. I was more experienced, but still an eager little puppy bounding his way through the world. The subtle amputation of my unflagging optimism began with the first two firings I'd ever experienced in my life. I suppose it's something that it took until I was in my mid-twenties to lose my first job, and I was unprepared for the emotional sub-dermal bruising that would linger long after I'd found another one.

I felt like someone who'd been dumped. I couldn't think of the old companies without bitterness, sadness, loss, hurt, and confusion. I hated them, and I wanted them back. That first firing is still a mystery to me. It was a small company, and the order had come from the two owners without warning or reason. I hadn't been perfect, but I thought I'd been staying on top of the avalanche of truly disgusting and misused computers that I was in charge of. When you are brought a computer to repair that's double sealed in garbage bags, be wary.

The second firing was expected and not expected, in the way we often find ourselves hoping against hope that life will sometimes take pity on the desperate. The job was exhausting but steady, and paid enough that we weren't drowning even with the addition of our new bundle of joy. Not long after sleep deprivation had nestled in and made a home for itself within our family (a home it still inhabits to this day) I began to arrive late for work. Not hours late, and not often, but the balding, limping help desk manager was strict and tardiness was a deadly sin. I was given my warnings, both verbal and written, bearing our signatures in duplicate. For two months I was able to reanimate my corpse daily at the appropriate time to avoid lateness, despite being exhausted enough to experience visual hallucinations every night. Usually spiders.

Then I got a flat tire, three or four miles from work. With less than fifteen minutes to make it on time, I began calling everyone that could possibly come get me. No one answered. I tried to fix the flat, and ended up breaking off the valve on the inner-tube itself. I chained my bike a a telephone pole and began to run towards the naval base near 6:00 o'clock in the morning.

Needless to say, I didn't make it. Even if I had been one minute late, the result would have been the same, and, in fact, I had been written up for just that amount of tardiness before. I had become a new father without a job, due to a flat tire and the uncaring nature of my place of employment. The world had taught me a lesson about itself that day.

Of course there have been other examples to reinforce that first teaching, but here, now, over a year removed from it, I can say that's when I lost the bulk of my optimism. I don't even know if I'd like some of it back. It feels like I was happier, then, but unless your name is Algernon there's no going back to naivety.

So I get my daily dose of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, innocence and optimism from my son. I foster it, encourage it to grow. And maybe one day a little will rub off on me, and I can slip on a pair of weak rose-colored glasses and look around for a bit.

But probably not.

Just kidding.

But seriously.

- David