Go mac! I am all for celebrating even the little things.

Speaking of, two things worth celebrating over here. Big thing: Franny's final report card came home and she pulled up two of her grades, so now all As and Bs, with an A in math. Small thing: homemade bath bombs as an afternoon DIY project.

YAY!! HOUSE OF BURRELL FOR THE WIN!!

honestly I cannot even imagine all As and Bs, that right there is heaven.

Fantastic news, Burrell!

Has anybody shared this here, yet? Bright spots, gotta collect em, share em, and treasure em.

Bright spots, like mac coming around. Msbelle Rebecca, you are an amazingly strong and effective mama.

The lightning bugs are out in force tonight.

Aw. Lightning bugs are the one thing I miss from the Midwest...

I totally miss lightning bugs.

I have to get ready to go to UCLA tomorrow. blargh. It's all good, right?

I'm going to my college reunion (in Ohio) next week and excited to see fireflies again.

Uhm. Really bad day today.

So. Therapy this morning, Yet again, it's me trying to come to terms with the abuse I went through growing up, and not making much progress. I've always dealt with the pain of rejection and loneliness by withdrawing. It's just so hard for me to open up about it with anyone, including my therapist.

So then, I get into work. I keep hearing chatter going on in all the cubes around me, and then I piece together what happened: a coworker suddenly dropped dead yesterday. 50 years old (a few months older than me), a triathlete. Nobody knows why, lots of speculation. The thing is, I only learn the news by listening in on the conversations going on around me. There has been no official announcement, and none of my colleagues showed any interest in including me in their conversations. My supervisor was in the next cube over talking with some of my colleagues, but just didn't bother to call me over.

The thing is, if someone had come up to me and said that so-and-so had died, I wouldn't be sure who they were talking about. I've been at this job for several years, but I'm really, really bad with names, and it's incredibly difficult for me to put names to faces. Even though I was in a meeting with this guy the day before. So I'm thinking maybe they're right in assuming that I probably don't care.

So after work, I go to get a drink. I really need a drink. A bartender I know has a shift at a bar near me on Wednesdays. I get there, and notice that she is visibly shaken up. Yesterday, she had left her phone behind at one of her other gigs. Today, she recovered her phone, and there were a whole bunch of messages from her Dad. Her Dad went to the doctor yesterday, and then the doctor immediately called an ambulance and sent him to the ER with some kind of serious heart issue. She was freaking out, and was waiting for someone to come in and fill in the rest of her shift. I tried to be as supportive as I could, but really wasn't a whole lot.

So then, after drinking, I walked around for a while and took photographs. Which is how I deal with things nowadays.

Life sucks sometimes, Tom. But you take beautiful pictures. Are you selling prints yet?

Tom, that's a lot of serious shit on top of both the ongoing work you're doing (which might feel like a slog to you, but you keep doing it, and that counts*) AND, Jesus Christ, the whole world going to hell.

And here's what I think about coping mechanisms: they exist for a reason -- to get us through the shit that we cannot fucking cope with. I'm on record as saying that even poor coping mechanisms are sometimes the only thing that saves your damn life, because as bad as the coping mechanisms are (like my brother's alcoholism), the shit you're dealing with (or, I guess, NOT) is so much worse.

Which is not a statement on your life, or my brother's, or mine. It's just...a statement. You take pictures, you get a drink, you withdraw when you have to. You know what? It's what you need to do right now.

*(I'm not trying to be a cheerleader about you going to therapy, because therapy can suck. It can be hard and boring and ridiculous and feel pointless. But I think that as long as you keep going, even when the progress feels glacial, it's an overall good. And you are SO worth it.)

(And -- ignore this if it's not what you need to hear right now, but sometimes I, personally, just need to hear this: fuck your family, man. Seriously. Damn.) (Bastion of mental health, c'est moi.) (But really. My brother gets random texts in the middle of the night from me and all they say is "Fuck our mother's narcissism." Someone has to say it.)