How Am I Doing?

"[He] deified the All and Life in order to find peace and happiness in the face of it"
- Nietzsche on Baruch Spinoza

A few things have happened that have prompted this blog.  First, I am recently separated and soon to be divorced (not of my choosing).  Second, I started to get asked the question "how are you doing?" a lot.  I can always muster a "fine" or "its tough, but I'm doing ok", but the words always feel trite.  There is no way a word or a phrase can accurately capture the pain, sadness, hurt, and loss that you feel on the wrong side of a divorce.

I am sure there are more than a few people who enter marriage with some baggage.  I certainly did, and to be fair, I don't blame my ex for leaving me and my suitcases behind.  However, it is way to simple to say I am able to just shrug my shoulders and say "I get it" and move on.  I understand why she did what she did, and I don't blame her.  It doesn't mean there isn't a chuck wagon full of other emotions.

It has most certainly caused the reckoning with me though.  What began as a process of "taking stock of my life" has morphed into a process of hard questioning about identity, value, life and myriad other sorts of things.  It often occurs to me that I have not lived a particularly authentic life.  Truth be told, I am a quiet, reserved, laid back sort of person.  In a word, I qualify as boring.  Probably on the extreme end of that scale.  To the extent that anyone has believed otherwise they have been fooled.  Ten years of living through a marriage with a guy like that... who wouldn't leave?  Let me come back to this in a few sentences though.

I joined Facebook a few months ago.  I have tried to keep up with it some, but something never felt right about it for me.  As I scrolled back through the pictures that I have taken and posted, it made me realize that it is just perpetuating more inauthenticity (according to Google that is not a word).  How could you know me or be a part of my life just from a few pictures of my kids shoveling Dippin' Dots into their pieholes?  Its just not... real.  

While there is probably some real value in the internet in regards to building human connections, I suspect it is not going to be realized through Facebook, Instagram and Snappyface.  Moreover, a Facebook timeline is not a legacy that I want to leave my boys.  I do not want them to look back on their time with me as endless happiness with a few lighthearted passing clouds captured in a sad-face picture.  I want them to be able to see me and my life for what it real-ly is.  It is a struggle to overcome failure, to wrestle with faults, to confront regrets, and to keep waking up each day to do it all over again.


How do that when one is "not a talker"?  Being boring has some relatively big drawbacks (in addition to destroying relationships!).  It doesn't lend itself to cultivating relationships.  I certainly wish I had friends that I could sit with and pour my thoughts out to.  Perhaps a friend to side with me regardless of how wrong I am (and to even sort of mean it).  Some of the folks I thought I was close to, I haven't heard from since the separation.  I suspect that even if I did have friends like that, it would probably result in consuming too much bourbon and deciding to do something stupid. 

So that's my pitch.  If you ask me how I am doing (and actually mean it), you are going to get this blog.  Good luck figuring out I really am though, because I sure haven't.  If you do find out, let me know.  I'll post some pictures and things on here with more context than you might get in another format.  Yes, you might have to read a little more as well, but if you care, you won't mind.  These are also letters to my boys, Sam and Hunter, who I love with all my heart (As Sam complained the other day, "You say that so much daddy it is like burned into my brain").  I hope that someday they will recognize that their Daddy might have been quiet, reserved and, yes, very boring, but he at least tried to give them something real.

What I Am Reading (I am an avid reader, and I figure I can share a little of it with everyone):

It by Stephen King - Because I have never read any of his books and it seems like it might be entertaining.

I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter - I just finished reading his Surfaces and Essences.  I was intrigued by idea of analogy as the core of cognition, and whether it applies to education.  I am interested here in the illusion of self.  We spend so much time trying to catalogue our identity, I think it is interesting to wonder about what it means if that identity is an illusion (or if identity and self are two different things?).

Ethics by Baruch Spinoza - I just read The Courtier and the Heretic and have the A Book Forged in Hell.  I figured I might as well try to tackle the real stuff now.  I am reading it very very slowly.  I am sure it will be on this list for a while!