Some Things to Like About 2013

2013 has been a year that it would be very easy for me to declare was an awful year on so many levels; we spent the entire year on the verge of bankruptcy, I was separated from my wife for a time, my wife tried to commit suicide, my son suffered a scary head injury, and I have been unemployed on four different occasions (just to name a few things).

I really want to take a moment to find some good things about what feels like 365 days of an elephant sitting on me, but before I do I am going to lay down some ground rules. First of all, I am not going to cite "at least I'm not" as a good thing (like "at least I don't live in a country that's having a civil war"); it is a great privilege to live in the country, and the time period that I do and have the opportunities I have had in my life, but the human brain is not wired to weigh such hypothetical scenarios as heavily as actual events in one's life, so for this exercise I will not invoke them.

Obviously anyone in the Savar Upazila building collapse
had a much worse year than me.

Second of all, I am not going to cite any things that might have happened, but did not, as good things (like "my wife's suicide attempt failed"); I feel that doing this is calling back to the bad events surrounding the near miss, and so such good things are tarnished. So with those two rules in mind, here is my list.


1. Margaret was diagnosed with BPD. Usually a person being diagnosed with any condition is not considered a good thing, but the condition itself is not new, its just that it was previously not diagnosed. With a proper diagnosis we can figure out how to live a life together that is a more happy one. In the past (before she was diagnosed) I frequently held hope that various BPD symptoms of Margaret's would just go away given time, and while it is now obvious that such hope was absurd, there is now real reason to believe that in time such symptoms may be lessened and controlled.


2. I have more of a sense of purpose with regards to my career. While this year has seen a great deal of upheaval in my job situation, leaving my cozy, but chaotic job at Fuller Austin has given me a chance to sample different possible jobs I might do as a Mech Tech. While at the start of the year I really didn't know what I should do with this education, today I feel that my best bet would be to continue to pursue drafting jobs, with the thought that given a better situation than the one I had at Entrec doing lift studies might work for me too.


3. I have learned a lot. 2013 was the year that watching edutainment videos and reading informative articles became my biggest "time wasters". Simply put, I am a smarter person than I was a year ago.


4. I have lost some weight. Not a lot, either in raw numbers or as a portion of what I need to lose, but the last I checked I am merely over-weight instead of obese as I had been for a couple of years. No doubt my part-time job at the theatre is helpful in this regard.


5. I have some good friends. I have always been a bit of a loner; actually I have always been a lot of a loner. And furthermore I have pretty low self-esteem, so I tend to assume that everybody else is as ambivalent about me as I am about them. But the last few months it feels like friends, old and new, have conspired to show me that maybe I do matter, and maybe I have actually positively influenced some people and maybe some people really do care.


That's all for now.

Happy New Year everyone!