We’re moving. Loads of fun. And, finally after ALL these decades, I’m getting rid of stuff. Much of the stuff was stuff I collected and took pains to keep, store, and take from home to home. Much of it, such as my record and comic book collections were really heavy. I had 25 long and short boxes of comic books, all meticulously catalogued, bagged, and boarded.
This is a tough question because like most moral questions, there are nuances to it. For those familiar with AA and Al-Anon, the idea of rescuing a loved one is front and center. IF your loved one is an adult the general thinking is that rescuing = enabling. However, when do we stop “rescuing” our children? When do they begin to “own” their own actions? Of course I do not mean life and death situations, but forgetting to do homework? Do YOU do it for them?
I’ve gone from literally a 24/7 presence in Social Media to a semi-shutdown and withdrawal. Perhaps it wasn’t as hard as those people that go cold turkey with smoking cigarettes (I never smoked) but it was still a shock to the system. It also wasn’t an immediate “shutdown” though it accelerated pretty quickly. The reasons are significant, paramount, and revelatory – a nice run of adjectives, don’t you think? Are those adjectives? I never was particularly good at grammar. Auto-correct occasionally saves me from myself.
Ah, the joys of sleeping. Do you think men and women approach and do sleeping at all differently? Well, of course they do because – gulp – men and women are so inherently different, as this 25th installment in this blog series will demonstrate with its usual careful analysis, astute observation, and painstaking research!
Recently, I wrote a column that apparently angered some readers as well as a dear friend of mine. Upon reflection, I realized that I probably have diarrhea of the mouth (or pen) and, sort of like Tourette syndrome I sometimes don’t censor my thoughts very well. I’ve since deleted that column. So, as a sort of penance and caution to others, I’m writing this column to encourage THINKING before speaking whatever comes to your mind, or hitting “publish” without careful reflection.
Last year, at this time, I hit a wall when I attended a dad conference. I looked around the room and realized THIS was not me anymore. I was older than the vast majority of dads in the room. Their issues, their lives, their passions were greater than mine as I was “moving on” given my boys were nearly grown. I briefly got depressed, but quickly got out of that self-indulgence and decided on taking a fork in the road with my next (professional) moves.
This will be the 24th column in this ongoing blog series. I think the topic options are inexhaustible!
How we manage time has ironically become a bigger issue than anyone would have predicted with the incredible growth of technology in our lives. Why all this technology has complicated our lives rather than simplify them is a conundrum itself. But, since this series is about the general differences between men and women, I’ll leave that question to the social scientists.
