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TACTICAL

So… how do you handle your depression?

One of the conflicts that I think exists between being “depressed” and suffering from depression is how it is perceived by the great unwashed.  Being sad because you are unable to purchase the full package from DirecTV, or the “GLX” model of a car is not the same as being clinically depressed.  It’s an unenviable condition, one whose pervasiveness cannot be lessened by the receipt of a simple material thing or finally being recognized by someone who you had hoped would BE that someone.

...and while “speaking of which”, while “the someone who may be that someone” is a topic that is worthy of its own right, it certainly has a low-level priority rating.  Talking about relationships has no relevance to what I am enduring at this time.  Just as depression is a contradiction of spirit that is alien to me, to discuss anyone who was once a part of my intimate feelings is to my current state.  Because objectively, there are many more positive incidents that are happening to me than whatever negative emotions that I am enduring currently.  For instance…

You can say that the break began last weekend when  I received a card in the mail Friday from a beloved friend that I met through blogging.  That is something that I mourn, that I was unable to get any cards to any of the addresses that I have this year.  Later Friday evening, a club member gave me a gift card to Le Quartier cafe in Dundee.  He and I began to establish a relationship/friendship through his Friday night routine with another co-worker, a personal trainer who I feel comfortable in calling friend as well.  This was completely unexpected as the guest is not my client.  After all, I am housekeeping and my interaction with guests are incidental to me doing my job.  But Friday nights are slow and between the three of us and another guest, a young actuary for M of O, we generally have a semi-boys night at the gym.  Still, the card was unexpected and very appreciated.  It did not, however, prepare me for Saturday morning.

I think that I have mentioned that I pick up a couple of Cinnabon and sausage biscuits from Burger King for a Saturday morning breakie for me and whoever is on the guest services desk when I arrive.  Usually it is a schoolteacher, in his mid-twenties, who I feel has accomplished a lot with his education and career.  I have told him that I am envious of his achievements as well as told him that teachers are among my heroes.  At any rate, when I got a gift card from HIM, I was floored!!  And that would not be the last time I would be leveled with gratitude.

So many of the guests stopped to wish me a happy holiday on Monday that I began to give out hugs!  I hugged my co-workers, got the chance to hug my former supervisor, and nearly all the people I regularly see throughout my days and nights (or is it the nights of my days??).  I could not help it, it was an honest reaction to what I was feeling.

Then this past Monday night as I talked with another “co-worker to be hugged” and another guest who I will call “Charles Haley” before I left for home, I felt the reaffirming of the epiphany I had when I settled on the tile floor my first night in Omaha (and have felt several times prior to the night in question), that whatever it is that I am looking for, whatever direction my life is to turn, all the roads in the nexus of my realities, that they all of led me HERE.  My life, as I shared with my audience, is good and it has continually been so (with several “eras of exception”!) and I have every reasonable expectation of it to remain so.  In short, it was a moment where I felt completely and totally alive.

Believe it or no, I have never made any further analysis of this song other than that, “it speaks to me.”  Paired with a comic book that shared the name of the band by using it, completely unrelated to each other, the song “So Alive” by Love & Rockets sonically captures a spirit that I would like to think is inside of me when I am involved in an intimate relationship.  I have never once trotted this or any song to a potential partner out as an accompaniment to our comings and goings.  It is what it is to me and like the speech that Coach Gaines gives to his team at halftime, it is something that I don’t think I will ever grow tired of.

It is with irony that I listen to people who are living “YOLO” and talking about living for themselves and how “this year is going to be different”.  And then they go forward as they are stumbling through their life as if they are going through a dimly-lit room, cluttered with just enough to trip them up and maybe cause injury (good thing for the ACA… are you enrolled already?).  As they have been through this room and others like it before and they feel the same, they are NOT all the same.  But you ARE.

The “two more quarters and that’s it” are every moment you spend being out of line with your purpose and desire.  Being able to really live in that moment with “clear eyes and love in your heart” at the approach of forever is something that I wholly embrace in my life.

NOW I DON’T KNOW IF THIS IS POT SHOTTING BUT IT MUST BE SAID

I really, really doubt if I will have any dealings with either Nebraska or Princess, perhaps for the rest of my life.  This is not to say that I have anything against them as it is stating the obvious.  They are both in relationships and as we were never friends (right Nebraska?), why should I maintain a space for them in my life, as imperfect as our relationships were.

There is no way that I think either of them can look me in the eye and say that they were with me, “with clear eyes and joy in their hearts… with love in their hearts”.  That being said, when 2014 rings in, they will be removed from my emotional hard drive.  It is evident that they have no desire to include me as part of their future, and for me to keep any room for them in my RAM would only cause the other programs to run slower.  Besides when one is lost in unrequited love, while the years will roll and the decades fly by, in mourning for what wasn’t there will be the cause of many a long, long day…