New Year’s Resolution: FAILURE?!?

THIS:

is my biggest internet enemy. It’s an addictive game from Yahoo! that I absolutely love. All you do is flip the little balls so that there are three in a row. They Explode! satisfyingly off the page, and new ones filter in from the top. Simple brain-decaying fun. The worst part is, I’m good at it, which means that one game can last up to two hours.

My New Year’s Resolution this year was to stop playing internet games, which was a huge deal for me. Internet games took up at least two hours a day, every day, and were my default activity. Surprisingly, it worked. But I started watching TV online instead, an activity that led me to finish five seasons of two shows (Six Feet Under and Nip/Tuck, both of which I’ll probably blog about more in coming posts), and keep up with a half dozen more. While I was finishing up my last semester of school. Bravo!

When I came back home, I decided to drop the internet TV thing, and I’ve been doing well. I bought the first season of The Wire, a show I’m really excited about seeing. That gives me my TV fix when I want it, and I can keep up my productivity on the side…

Except that I’ve started playing Super Bounce Out again! This is my confession, and my promise to renew my resolution.

Hi, I’m Emily, and I’m an bounceaholic. It’s been thirty minutes since my last game. That might not seem like very long to some of you, but I’ve been binging after five months sober, and the temptation is strong again. When I get the urge to bounce, I plan to write e-mails and work on packing instead. After all, I’ll be in a new city in August, and I don’t want my bouncing to follow me there.

I’m thinking of this not as failure, but as a new opportunity to challenge myself. It’s not often you get to cross the same bridge twice, and the fact that I did it so well the first time means I’m doubly sure of success this time.

Happy Father’s Day!

Here are some quotes I found:

“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.” -English Proverb

“It is a wise father who knows his own child.” -William Shakespeare

“My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.” -Jim Valvano

“He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”
-Clarence Budington Kelland

A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again. ~Enid Bagnold

There’s something like a line of gold thread running through a man’s words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself. ~John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, 1994

I love my dad. So far today, we’ve been running, we’ve cleaned up the basement, and he’s now taking a nap while I run out and get a card for him (I’m not a bad daughter, I just procrastinate a lot!). Tonight, we’ll cook out and laugh. With our brown picket fence and our dog. He’s made us lucky.

Good Grief

In the middle of my first year of college, a boy I had a crush on was in a horrible car accident and died.  It took me completely by surprise, and I had to go through those cliche five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, & acceptance) pretty quickly.  I always get bogged down in the depression.  I cried myself to sleep for a week straight, and off-and-on for another month.  To keep my roommate from realizing this (I’m still not sure if she did or not) and to comfort myself with warmth, I developed a habit of sleeping with the covers completely over my face and body.  It’s something I still do, especially if it’s been a hard day.

Today hasn’t been as bad as that.  I think these stages of grief can be used in the loss of almost anything, and for me, friendships are the things that change the most and demand the most emotional energy from me.  Today I’m working my way through the stages again, for two different relationships:

1. One of my good friends from home is moving.  It won’t change our friendship overall, but it does mean that I won’t see him every day anymore, and I thought that we had the entire summer.  Yesterday, he accepted a job, and he’ll move on Tuesday, which gives us three more days together.  I think I’m between denial and anger right now–I feel a little bit robbed, but I’m also so proud of him for finding a job that he’s interested in where he wants to be.  I’ve already delved into bargaining–I set up a trip to visit him over the fourth of July.  But I have a feeling the days after he leaves might be dominated by depression, and that just sucks.

2. I’ve been having problems with a friend from school.  It’s long and complicated, but I feel like our friendship has been dissolving and slipping through our fingers as we watch.  It’s not really on either one of us, which means that we’ve both done some pretty shitty things, but at this point, I don’t think we’re going to move forward until we move on.  We definitely reached the anger and bargaining points today, and I’ve been in the depression stage for a good three months.  I hope we can keep trying for a little while longer, but I worry that we’re beating a dead horse, and might have to wait for something else to blossom organically.  Talk about mixed metaphors, right?

So yeah, I’ve had worse, but it’s been a hard day.  The first friend and I are going to veg out and watch movies tonight, which is our standard activity.  It should be a little comforting, and I’m looking forward to it.  But I think I’m also going to pull the covers up over my head tonight and hope that sleep comes quickly.