TACTICAL
I guess I will hope to get my plane ticket to South Bend THIS week, as I miscalculated when I was getting paid! It is a bummer, because I found a ticket for $230, which was the best price ever!! It would be cool to catch a price like that, which would be a savings of $100 off the prices that I have already scoped out.
Madison, my Trek road bike, has been replaced gratis by the Trek company.The frame was broken, and that isn’t supposed to happen. I did have to pay for the rear axle which came to about $40. I decided to keep the name, and along with a refurbished London, I have 2 pretty cool bikes!!
August will likely mark the month I start picking up the pace on my roadwork. I am kind of experimenting with some interval training, some of which I will have to do something that I dread, going to secondary sites to run. I am accustomed to opening my door and doing the “left, right, left” down the street as I close my door. But there are some runs that because of their intended goals, will prolly require me to find a route to properly execute the suggested training.
Right now, I think that I am going to let the fall come and go without any taking classes at Metro Community College. This is going to be an executive decision and that will be that with that. No need to press myself when it comes to academics, and with adding my certification studying to the mix, I will be better served by getting my certification to be a Personal Trainer. Who knows… maybe I will send my soon-to-be updated resume to a company and get hired in as a part of their wellness program (or something!).
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"You need somebody that really cares about you to tell you you're not remembering like you were" -former NFL and Notre Dame football player Ricky Waters
I don’t have the kind of drama that plagued my life I first began my journal. This is not because I have adjusted to my condition (to the contrary, I believe that I push the edges of my abilities in spite of what may be recommended, medically speaking, for someone in my situation ) as time has gone on. But other than willpower and belief that I can do what I set out to do in life (whatever that may yet be), and having codified my life in the abstract, has kept me from panicking or from losing my way as I go about the world.
Thinking of myself in the abstract has also helped me to remain unique and untroubled by my lack of having a defined identity in society. My way of thinking is very iconoclastic, and by iconoclastic I mean there are no sacred cows in my world (save for maybe Tommy Hearns :0)). Everything is up for critique and examination, with new findings to be considered and reconsidered over and again. I can’t be easily placed, nor can my behavior be reliably predicted.
On Facebook, Beth posted an article about former Notre Dame and NFL star Ricky Watters and his journey back to Notre Dame to finish his bachelor degree. I was particularly drawn to the segment of the article where he discusses his dealing with concussions problems resulting from his football career. His wife, Catherina, really nails it when she talks of her experience with her husband and brain injury. “It’s hard. If you don’t live with that person, you wouldn’t notice. You probably find that he speaks intelligently and speaks well. He remembers the questions that you’re asking. But it’s something that I definitely can tell.” For me, my co-workers, along with my therapist, reliably serve that purpose for me.
About two months ago, as the stress began to build around my Carolina trip and finishing school for the spring, one of my supervisors and I were having a discussion about “nothing”, when she asked me a question and I had to consciously “think” about my response. She waited, patiently I might add, and after I was able to respond, she said, “I get it… sometimes it takes you a second to get things straightened around”, with the unsaid reference to my condition. It did not bother me… instead, I took it as a sign that she CARES and does so in an active way. Then, before I went out with Nebraska, after we rescheduled, she overheard me mention that I was going out with an “old friend”, and she shot me a sideways glance. “You aren’t going back out with Princess again?”, with the same kind of concern that you would expect to hear from someone “who gives a damn plus”. While I don’t make personal slips like this often, I guess the gossip story from that relationship is that Princess was a crappy person to me. And, I guess, she was. She was very crappy at the end, but I had no idea that it mattered in the least to anyone other than me. I was touched, because I NEVER assume that anyone concerns themselves with my well-being, rather relying on being pleasantly surprised when I am enlightened to the contrary. The reason for this is quite simple… the people that I should have been able to assume to have a vested interest in my well-being have usually been those who could have actually cared less about me, if I were to judge them by their actions.
Right now my needs demands certain things of people who want to be in my life, particularly if they want to be close to me. The irony of those who would believe that my requirements are being driven by my disability is that nothing could be, in my mind, further from the truth. The things that Ricky Watters and his wife speak about aren’t specific to having to deal with brain injury as it is, at least as it appears to me, more about fairness and compassion. Either you have it for someone or you don’t. For instance, these were elements that were missing in my relationships with my ex-wife and Mookie Dee. Neither of them were fair or compassionate in the respective relationships that we had, and I feel that because that lack those two components, the two relationship failed miserably. It also explains why I find those who engage in the “back and forth” of unstable relationships as intriguing in the same way that a young child is intrigued by the formation of a scab on the knee. The painful process of acquiring the scab and watching its formation is not something that desired again.
Yeah… this is a not-so-veiled indictment of generally recent local developments. I am a very competitive and I don’t like feeling like I lost a competition (and if you don’t think that one of the key dimensions of life is not driven by competitiveness, then I am sorry, but maybe that means you have “lost” already)... yet another reason that I have never considered trying to actively win back an ex-girlfriend. My mental image of a "relationship rematch” is immortalized by what I saw in the second Aaron Pryor - Alexis Arguello boxing match. Their first fight was a classic, but there was controversy despite its conclusive end. The rematch, a good fight, not classic, was just as conclusive. It was over, the debate of who was the better fighter. I believe the same about relationship, only that instead of winners and losers, there is an uneasy truce, that grows to be an observed armistice that defines the limits of that one relationship.
The moments that make a healthy relationship… the growth between the two parties from the start to wherever they are now… all that is gone. The person that has been evolved to… I missed the process and missed that they have gone through… this was evident in the trio of relationships that I have tried to reconnect to, Mookie Dee, Tee Jay, and the SFC. This does not mean that the emotions expressed, particularly in the latter two, were not genuine. It is that the the experiences reconfirmed for me that “where you come from is gone … and where you thought you were goin’ to weren’t never there… and where you are ain’t no good unless you can get away from it…”
3 comments:
I was looking forward to seeing what you wrote about the article on Ricky Watters. You didn't disappoint. :)
The second half of the Ricky Waters quote, though, is he has to *listen* to what his friends tell him.
For years I wondered how differently things would have been if Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley had just one good friend who would tell them the truth. I found out later that people did try to tell them- and found themselves cut out of their friend's life for doing so.
Very real entry!
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