Monday, May 11, 2015

I Live in Iowa: Week 203

It's good. It's bad. It just is. Solidly average. I read a story this week that had an impact on me about a person who struggled with depression. Yes, it's about a young successful competitive runner at a prestigious academic university, but more generally it's about the constant stream of media and social media we consume that is filtered to show us lives that are impossibly perfect. It resonates with me because I try hard to convey the bad times. When I started blogging in 2009 one of the basic premises for me was to give it to people strait, not sugar coated, but in the depressing, raw, painful, joyous, sometimes bipolar way that life really happens.

I'll strait up tell you, I can't believe my left fibula still hurts! I'm frustrated! It's been like ten weeks now since it was identified and I really cut back. I only ran 2 miles last week. It's been a month since the 24 hour world championships, how long will this take to heal! That being said, I prayed for it not have to be a pain during the world championships, and it wasn't, not for 90 long miles. It feels like a miracle. So the fact that it relapsed is interesting to say the least and also less stressful than  it was before the race, because the truth is, I do have time to recover. I can take three months off if that's what it takes.

Work was rough, then it was great. I'm dealing with a technical quality issue. We specified something, and we didn't get exactly that, and determining if it is acceptable is really difficult. This is deep into the gray area of engineering that I get paid to make sense of. In other words, not the kind of issue that is fun to work on because there are daily meetings to discuss the progress and there is quite a bit at stake. However, the last two work days I went to Richmond, Virginia to do a sale show for some customers and I had the pleasant opportunity of showing people how to operate the machine. When a person climbs off with a little smile on his face, you know it's good. I need to see that. The normal channels between customers and the engineers like myself have so many people in between us that I rarely have direct contact with customers. It's nice to see something that we worked hard on being enjoyed by customers. It's nice to talk through some of the decisions we made about design details and see that they don't disagree.

Finally Saturday was my birthday, I'm old. Some friends and I grilled out at our friend's back yard then went out, to the bars. I will tell you what, going out is not for the old! It's funny, I am awfully reluctant to go out after like 9 PM, yet I feel like Saturday night after 9 PM I affected some people in a positive way I would never have had the opportunity had I not gone out. Don't think anyone can use that excuse to get me to go out more! Point being, I had no idea how my night would go, but I think I managed to share some love, for lack of a better word, with some people who needed it. Something you don't hear too often: there is a lot of pain at the bars. Everyone has baggage, pain, angst, and it seems like some people seek out relationships or escaping from the pain or more directly love, at the bars. I know that when I feel alone it is great to know someone cares about me, and Saturday night I was able to share with a number of people that they are cared for.

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