Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2003
Everything is gonna be okay, posted at 11:29 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Yesterday afternoon Bill gave me a call, and asked me to sub in on his softball team that evening. It was a playoff game, but most everyone else on the team was out of town. His team lost 12-0, mercied, but I contributed as best I could, with 2-for-2 with two doubles and making every play hit out to me in left field. The SOBO league was quite a bit more competitive than my usual BSSC haunts, and I enjoyed myself a great deal.The only problem is that my ass hurt. Badly. About a month ago, I was riding a jet ski on Lake Michigan, and, afterwards, my rear end hurt a bit. Not a big deal, I thought, and it'll go away. Well, it really hasn't gone away, and apparently the five mile run the other night has exacerbated it. I now have a huge pain in my ass, to the point where I broke out the heating pad last night, even in my un-air-conditioned house. I might have a bruised tailbone or something. I've done a little Internet research on it, and apparently there's not much you can do about it except buy a fancy pillow with a hole in the middle of it to sit on, and since it doesn't hurt to sit, I'm not worrying about that right now. And, can you imagine having one of those pillows while trying to teach? My 9th graders would never let me forget it.
Afterwards, the team did our usual after-game bar trip, except it ended up being only Bill and I. My Italy bud is now someone I can count as one of my best friends, ever, and I immensely enjoy his company. One thing that continues to be atypical for me since I moved to Baltimore is having closer male friends than female friends, and it's something I enjoy because it just seems that there is less of a wall between us, less of a white elephant hovering over our collective shoulders. Over two Miller Lites, we waxed on about money issues, poor supervisors, baseball, and women, pausing for a sip or a fry or a laugh. We made a $5 bet that Jack Cust would hit at least 8 home runs in September for the Orioles. I realized that I had barely held a conversation with anyone since Friday, my birthday, and the human interaction was exactly what I'd been craving.
This month of July 20 - August 20 has been one of my most stressful in memory, one of the months that four or five years ago would have sent me plummetting into bubbling cauldron of anxiety, overeating, and depression. While some of the symptoms have been there - the sleepless nights, the physical manifestations of my stress culminating in stomach aches - none of the other ones have been. I haven't, like I did in the summer of August 1999, living in Snyder-Phillips before beginning my 3rd year of res-life, sat by my window, and listened to that Bjork song "Hyper Ballad" and contemplating just escaping to my car via the window and just driving as far away as I could. This year, I've just sort of strived on, content in the knowledge that the higher power is only dishing it out to me because I can take it better than most, that it's the response to my errors that counts, that 10% is what happens to me and 90% is how I react to it. The cliches all ring true for me at this point. And it got me through it. I no longer am having sleepless nights. I see a definitive and bright light at the end of this tunnell of financial stress. I supremely confident not only that I will make it through August, but that I will make it out of debt, which is something that I didn't believe a year ago, or two years ago. I like to think that it's my stronger mentality that has allowed me to get through this month of my life. I'm perhaps a bit more jaded after this summer, but my optimism has not dimmed. With only a week before I begin work again - a date that I'm looking at as a salvation - there is no question in my mind that I'll be okay.