Jenny

Everything Has Changed. Topsy Turvydom.
Turnarounds in every aspect of my life are occuring. For the better. For the worst. For a change.

I feel very much like a cork on the surface of a turbulent sea. Hurled from place to place, bounced and flipped by the sea. But alive, and surviving.

I am now on a leave of absence from my employer, AVENCOM. What this means is that I will have some time to consider my career options. In all likelihood this means I will be going freelance. So If you have need of a guy who can do a bit of everything, or who can answer your obscure web questions for money, I’d be a good choice. I’ll be reactivating my professional portfolio in the coming days and weeks. My folks are helping me out with financial buffer. I will also update my Respiratory Therapy resume. Every one of my survival skills needs to be in play now.

On Monday, Jennifer. Jennifer and I will have joint counseling Monday night. Jennifer is currently expressing positive feelings about a reconciliation. Frequent readers of this blog may note that this is a change. It is impossible for me to judge or guess what will happen with regards to my marriage. I simply don’t know. I don’t know what’s in my head. I don’t know what’s in my heart. The whole affair is confusing and painful to me. I feel love for her, but I am not certain that what needs to happen is for us to be back together as a couple. Time will tell what happens. I do know that I want to be happy. And I do know that I want Jennifer to haappy. Beyond that, I’ve no idea.

On Tuesday, I’ll be on the radio, I believe. The Lounge, a show from local NPR affiliate KPBS. I’ll be talking about blogs. I hope I can be articulate about the subject. I do think I know the subject well, and have been blogging for some time myself. Co-guesting with me will be Lester of Yeah, Totally.

On Wednesday, I’ll be going to Hawaii. Yes!, what you really want to do when you are out of work is take a vacation. Well, the idea is to chill out and try and understand what the heck is going on. Maybe that will help. I know my trip to Washington D.C. to see my sister helped a lot.

Could I possibly have more going on?
My parents and sister left yesterday, returning to the East Coast. It was wonderful to have them in town. They have provided valuable counsel and the truth we were able to share was important and cathartic. I’m working to resolve many things in my life – physical | emotional | intellectual | spiritual. My Dad says “Jenny may have saved your life by leaving you”—and I tend to agree. I was out of balance in many ways, and this “wake up call” has forced me to take a critical look at my life. My Mom wants me to get more spiritual. I think she understands better that I struggle with faith very much. Despite being a formerly devout Catholic, faith no longer comes easy to me. My work in healthcare and my first hand observations of the pain in the world made me question the idea of a primary diety long ago. I definitely fall into the “agnostic” category. If I had a faith, I’d declare it, believe me. My sister is very worried about me. I love her so much. She herself is undergoing a career transition and I want to see her rock the world. She’s immensely talented and I forsee good things for her.

I also found out that my Mom has begun reading this blog. She liked my shoeshine piece. This gratifies me. I always knew that having family reading this journal was a possibility, and likewise always knew that It would not change the content. I attempt to exercise caution about how I phrase things, and attempt to be tactful and nonspecific enough that nobody has grounds to be offended, or be slandered, or libeled, etc. The idea here is to be honest and expressive of where I’m at.

I joked with my folks that my life has turned into a country song. Lost my wife. Lost my cat. Lost my job. Or perhaps blues is a more appropriate genre?

And that’s the way it is, July 14, 2002.

Breaking The News

Tonight I went over to see my Grandmother to break the news about Jenny and me. I was terrified about how she would take it. And the whole ghoulish thing is just so horrible to tell. My Grandmother was wise, and wonderful, and hopeful that the best outcome would come from all this. She wishes well to Jennifer, and was as supportive as I could imagine. I am so, so lucky to have family who always seem to offer insight. I am incredibly lucky to have her. Gradually, word is seeping out into the family. And as my Grandmother said tonight “problems are shared” – which I suppose is a kind of variation on “many hands make light work.” Though I have a hard time thinking that what I am now experiencing could ever be described as “light.” This is by far harder than anything I have ever had to deal with in my life. Though perhaps given time that assessment will change.

Also today I got an email from Jenny’s Grandmother. It was in Spanish, and I did pretty well with about.com’s spanish/english dictionary and of course babelfish – but I had the friend of a friend also take a look to make sure I got all the nuances. This is the first contact with Jenny’s Abuela in some time, and certainly since this started. She is doleful, but hopeful. The recurring theme I keep hearing is that this is normal—problems in marriage are par for the course. The question is how one deals with them. So far, I’m alive, and trying to make sense of it all.

Onward.

Inbound!
Charles and Jenny are both using the san diego bloggers badge. And others are noticing and linking as well.

Over the weekend I did almost no blogging and got an amazing amount of crud done. Maybe not crud, but stuff.

I did Jenny’s and my taxes (woo hoo!) and because I had a more conventional job than in the past few years (1 full time gig) the taxes were much more clear-cut. No freelance income, not enough business expenses to catalog in detail. Very painless and quick, and I filed electronically which I’ve done for the past 4 years if I remember right. I used Macintax, or rather TurboTax for Mac, which made the process even smoother.

Jenny and I also went to our local Fry’s and picked up a printer cable for her machine. Since we got her a new computer she’s had no luck printing. Turns out it was NOT Windows 98, incompatible drivers, or the Postscript driver – it was the PRINTER CABLE. Looks like the one we had, which was 25 feet long (very nice in it’s day) went bad. The exasperating thing was that the prints we would get would come, they were just bad. Printer technology is either more complex, or much simpler that something like TCP/IP. With that, one can ping to see if the connection is good, and if it’s good, things work. With this, the actual signal was weaker or damaged, causing printing problems. I of course blamed myself for installing the drivers wrong as it’s always a pain to install new drivers on Wintel. I was also blaming Win98 for general flakiness, but with no basis. I was also thinking that it might be the printer (an HP 5MP) might be dying. I had listened to enough of my lovely wife Jenny’s whining reporting printer problems to her Help Desk (Note: Help Desk = me) for several months, I thought I’d give a new cable a shot. So that’s another monkey off my back.

I also played racquetball on Saturday—wonderful games as per usual. Though I find that I have bruises on my legs I’m not sure how I got. I think they are the result of hitting the walls when going hard to make returns. I’ll have to watch that, exuberance is good but I don’t want to hurt myself. I can feel my knees are stressed for a few hours after a game – I’ll have to baby my knees, which are definitely a point of failure for my body as I age.

Speaking of that, yesterday I watched the USRA US Open. I had taped it from Friday from ESPN. I was delighted to see that the champs are older guys – there was even a guy age 50 in the semi-finals.

Add to that, the weather is improving, getting warmer. In 2-3 months the ocean temperature will be warm enough for the beach. In March Jenny and I will go to the wedding of a friend in Las Vegas. In May Star Wars Episode II will be out. In April Edward Tufte is coming to town! (You’d better not chart junk I’m telling you why!) And in July my sister and parents will be flying from back east for a visit. Still no peace in our time, but I’ll accept these personal niceties in lieu of general planetary contentment for the time being.

Griffith Observatory will get a massive refit!
It’s going to take 3 years, but that’s good timing since I’m not in L.A. now. Heh.

I’m a sucker for Griffith Observatory. When I was a kid, maybe 6 or 7 years old I saw a planetarium show there that included a bit on constellations, and speculated on creatures from outer space. They included some pulp SF covers which scared the daylights out of me! I wish I knew which covers they were, it would be cathartic to see them again. That was also the era of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, aggravating my suggestibility. Oh, and I also have a soft spot for Paula Abdul’s Rush Rush, a song whose video features the observatory prominently—it copycats the plotline Rebel without a Cause. When I lived in L.A., I would often go up there to look, especially when I had visitors. One visitor from stands out: Jenny and Joe @ Griffith Park Observatory, 1996. And yes, that’s the Hollywood sign behind us – the camera is facing northwest.

And yes, it’s true. In addition to scads of html and javascript ephemera, I also keep the plotlines of Paul Abdul videos in my head.