Of Pens and Swords

• We moved, it being Jess’s first time moving away from home, ever.

• I integrated into a job that had some tough shoes to fill.

• We found out we were having a baby

• I started in a new unit that is just starting out.

• My brother came out for a visit.

• My company lost the contract, started working with a new company. Got a new pen and coffee mug out of the deal.

• The kids came out for the summer.

• Jess and I got married

• The kids went back for school, one with a Mohawk.

• I started school back up.

• We had a baby boy that is growing exponentially.

• We went back to visit for Christmas.

• Finished the first semester with 4 A’s.

• and now, I get a 4% raise at the end of the year. Not much, but it’s something.

There have been a hundred little milestones this year also. It’s been a year of firsts for Jess and myself. I’m used to having firsts all the time, but not as enjoyable. Jess, I don’t think, is used to having this many. Either way, she’s handled them very nicely and with grace. We have lived together for a year now, after a year of being gone, and honestly, I thought it was going to be a lot more rough than it has been. I can go more into this in another posting, how people should find a person who don’t have qualities that they know they don’t like, instead of trying to find the one person who has all (and only) the qualities they do want. Anyways….

Next year, who knows. I know in two weeks I go to a boot camp to get my certs done finally, the end of Feb I go away for 2 weeks for an army school, I start up classes again immediately after…and work. School, family and work. That sounds like 2007 for me.

The break. Intermission.

I was driving home the other day, and was thinking of problems of dependencies of services here on my network. I won’t bore you with the details, but it lead me to think about dependencies in people, how some place their dependencies on others instead of themselves. Take Happiness for instance. In order for me to be happy, I have to make myself happy. I can define things that make me happy, and some of those fall on the actions of others. Overall, however, it’s up to me to accept those actions as a ’service’ that makes me happy.

I then thought about, how could I explain this in layman’s terms to someone else, to drive the concept home. How could I describe dependencies to say, a child of 6. A basketball came into mind. Here’s how:

1. Take two basketballs (or any other large balls for that matter, not mine) and tether them with a yarn, or a thread, and put a loop around it to fit your hand through. Make the tether about 6 feet long or so. The ball should be small enough to hold, but large enough to be sort of unmanageable.
2. Now, take the loop, and put your hand through one, the other persons through the other. You are now tethered to that ball.
3. Explain that the ball represents “Happiness”, or “Feelings”, “Emotions”, so forth. You are now holding on to your Happiness, and it’s tethered to you.
4. The objective is to not let the ball fall, or let your “happiness” fall. If it does, it will break. Now play, bounce around, run in circles, whatever. This running around represents living life, going about your business, so forth. More than likely, you can hold onto your Happiness with no problem. It may require using both hands at some point, but nevertheless, it’s manageable.
5. Now, I pass my ball off to the other person. It’s still tethered to me. I explain that now, you (the other person) are holding my happiness. Treat it like your own, hold it up high, and don’t let it fall. (this represents me passing off the responsibility of maintaining my happiness)
6. Repeat step 4. The more you play, the more my tether is going to become tight. So tight, that now my happiness is pulled from your (the other persons) arms. What!?, You let my happiness fall!?!
7. Pick up my happiness, explain to the other person that you can’t let my happiness fall, or it will break. The other person is going to probably note that it’s becoming unmanageable to hold both their happiness and mine, and they can’t play as much nor enjoy life as much because now the workload has become great. I am going to ignore this, because, well, all I care about is my happiness, not theirs. I explain that it’s more important to hold onto my happiness and keep it from breaking than it is theirs, because, afterall, it is mine.
8. Repeat step 4 again. Now that I’ve thoroughly explained how important it is that my happiness is to take precedence, I’m sure that the other person is going to take great care in not letting my happiness fall again. If they do, I may cry.
9. While playing, the other person held onto my happiness, and tight, because I was playing hard. They held onto it so tight that while trying to put down their happiness for a while, making sure it didn’t break or get caught up in the other person’s happiness (which would make both balls fall), the tether broke. They sure held onto my happiness tight, and didn’t let it drop, but in the process, ripped my happiness from me. Now, I don’t have any happiness, it’s been ripped from me. The other person, in the process, had to also drop their happiness in order to have both hands to hold onto mine.

I think this could be applied to almost any emotional need of a person, to explain how being solely dependent on someone else to provide for your emotional wellbeing is detrimental to both parties. I think it would be a great explanation of what others do sometimes expect of you, and why it’s important to never take on the responsibilities of holding both your emotions and theirs. If they drop their emotions because they’re mad, well, it wasn’t you that they can blame in the end for hurting their feelings, but their own. It’s also a good explanation, I feel, to show why it’s important not to rely on others for what in the end is a dependency that only you can hold.

In the Army, that didn’t work all the time. If I was the best at what I did, I was sent on more missions, gone more often. In the rear, if I strove to be the best, I was either seen as the goto guy, or a threat to someones insecurities. No real big deal there anyways.

In the real world, my expectations seem to work out well, however. There is rarely the requirement that I follow step by step instructions from the boss, but more that I just get the job done. When I can consistently get the job done twice as quick as any of my peers, it seems to draw kudos, except for my peers.

I was always taught to lead by example, and that’s been my intentions most of the time. If I am an example of how to do the right thing, I figure I’m being a service to everybody. Seems that sometimes it just seems like I’m rocking the boat by some…anyways, that’s not the point I started out with.

My point that I wanted to make was that I try to do the best, and now it’s in school. I have performance metrics that I set for myself and try to meet those standards. They’re usually standards that are something like, I will ace this class. Then when I miss a few points, I get pissed, try harder. If I make silly mistakes, I get annoyed at myself that I missed something so damn silly, try to figure out the circumstances of why I overlooked the obvious, and make sure not to do it again if I can help it. This semester, 12 hours taken, and I got a 94.5 average of all the classes. That’s not too bad. I could have done better though. That average could of been, and should have been, closer to a 98. Two seemingly simple mistakes cost me. And here I am being hard on myself.

This is where I come into the dilemma. I want my kids to excel. I want my kids to have a wide range of topics they are interested in, learn the importance of being as good as they possibly can be, and to set achievable standards, meet those standards, and fit them into goals. I want to teach them that they can do anything they want to that they’re happy with, but also show them that contrary to our parents teaching, happiness can be gotten with money. To get that, you have to work your ass off to make goals realities, and to not slow down until you’re relatively sure that you won’t be knocked back down the ladder, having to start over. I have to try and teach them this, and press them to be the best they can be, but I know that I can’t push them like I push myself. I have to show them that mistakes can and will be made, and those are learning experiences, not anything else. I have to learn to balance this.

I see the news where parents get into fights because of their kids sports play, and I think, what standards to those parents have on their kids? Are they single focused goals that have only one path, and that’s why they push them so hard? Is the parent only banking on their son’s ability to play football for his whole future, and that’s what causes the stress? Would that stress be more evenly applied if they pushed their kids down multiple paths going in the same direction? In physics, this works out, just means that the object can’t move down all the paths as fast as if the same pressure was applied down one channel. It doesn’t mean that there is any less pressure though, overall.

I don’t know. Someday, when the kids are all out of the house, and on with their own lives, maybe I’ll have all these problems worked out :)