January 27, 2011

It has been one of those weeks. You might think that I am about to write about how dreadful the week has been for me, but in all honesty, it has been a really good week. I hope this is a sign of how 2011 is going to be, now that we are nearly a month into this whole ’11 experience.

This morning as I was taking a shower, I found myself grinning. Granted, I still had a silly grin on my face from the dream (see previous post) that I had just woke up from, but I also found myself grinning because I was excited to be going to work. Perhaps the Vitamin D pills I’ve been taking (sunshine in a capsule, I guess) helped coax the inner smile out, but I am feeling a hell of a lot better at the end of this week versus the way I was feeling on Monday morning. It’s amazing what a few days and a few conversations with yourself can do. I ‘fessed up to some of my own personal hangups I have and I’m realizing that while I strive to live a healthy life (and I’m moderately successful at it, I suppose), I’m never going to have that lean, mean body builder body that I always thought I could have. Heck, I even had a little cub gut when I was still in my single digits, why I thought I could achieve something different at age 42 is beyond me.

At a holiday gathering not too long ago, one of my family members asked what I was doing for work these days. I still can’t believe when I tell someone what I do, because it’s something that I used to really want to do when I was a young teen geek. I write programs. I (along with a bunch of other very talented people) maintain network monitoring systems that give smart people the tools to monitor the dialtone for millions of people across the country. That’s wicked cool. I speak Unix. I speak Linux. I speak Solaris and I write in code (PHP and Perl, to be exact). I make data connect. I’ve come so far from the BASIC programs I wrote in the mid 1980s to where I am today and it’s something that I still can’t believe I do and actually get paid for it. When 5 p.m. arrived this afternoon, I could have stayed at my desk at least another two hours continuing on the project I was working on. Granted, it would have made the night seem rather short, but I could have easily stayed and worked and actually enjoyed it, until I realized how much I was missing my husbear and family.

I have been a lucky man for these 42 years. I have tried many things. I’ve been a radio personality, I’ve worked as a caregiver and I’ve been a geek in some capacity all of my life. Each step along the way, however curvy the road has been, has brought to me where I am today.

I would usually say that I am a lucky man, in fact, I just did in the previous paragraph. More importantly, I am a grateful man and I’m also a happy man.

It has been a good week.

I almost always remember at least one of my dreams on any given night. I have a dream journal that I write in from time to time, even if it’s a bullet list of the images or themes I encountered in the dreamscape that night. I occasionally find it amusing to go back and read these journal entries. I wouldn’t dare share them with others as I’m afraid I’d end up in some nut house making rag rugs with blunt scissors. I like to give the appearance of functioning in modern society.

My dreams alternate between wild, whimsical and theme-laden. Last night’s story seemed to feature a cross of all of this. In the dream I had continued with my radio career and had eventually made my way to where many celebrities of my age end up.

I was selected to be Richard Dawson’s replacement of “Family Feud”. Apparently I was skipping the hosts that have had the duties since Mr. Dawson, I was the chosen host and there was going to be much excitement.

One of the families on my first outing was a row of shirtless frat boys who were drinking a lot of beer. The other family was your usual Midwestern family with a ma, pa, kids and a grandma who needed to kiss me on the lips because that’s what Richard did.

We got into the mechanics of the game, which were pretty true to what we know on television and the sound effects were the old ones and the board flipped instead of being electronic. I was having a grand old time being host but towards the end of the game the grandma that had kissed me couldn’t figure out the buzzer so she wanted to arm wrestle with one of the bearded, shirtless frat boys. For this I apparently changed into a tux and read the question into the microphone and the grandma yelled out ‘beep beep beep’ and started arm wrestling the dude. This all seemed quite normal and I think I might have yelled out “Survey Says!” really loud because it was then that I woke up.

There is some symbolism in there that I’m still mulling over but for the most part I woke up with a big smile on my face. I had fun last night!

I think it’s time to change my aspirations and start watching Game Show Network again.

Oh, one curious thing: in my dreams I almost always have a full head of hair and just a mustache. I wonder if this is how my subconscious or soul or whatever sees me, kind of like the way Neo controlled the way he looked in “The Matrix”. Interesting.

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