Tuesday, August 24 2021
a watermelon asshole, three brain farts, and finding satisfaction
Dear Journal,
Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. Right now, the house couldn't feel any more different from the usual 8:30 AM scene only a week ago. The living room TV is already roaring with cartoon Spider-Man action. The dogs are prancing around each other in the living room. Miles is waling on a thirty pieces of cut up watermelon.
"Have we given up?" I asked Marissa. "Do we just feed him watermelon now?"
She shakes her head and sadly replies, "There's no other way."
My son Miles is beautiful, mild-mannered, and agreeable. But when that baby catches sight of juicy red watermelon, he becomes a monster. He must have it, and his eyes well up furious tears if you dare keep it from him. In that moment, all other food tastes like ash in his mouth, and he refuses to eat anything else while he's in the same room as that cut up watermelon. What I'm trying to say is my son Miles is a watermelon asshole.
Miles with hands folded prays for all the watermelon he thinks he deserves.
Sip. How are you feeling today this Tuesday morning? What are you up to? What are you eating? Have you found any good music to listen to?
This morning I'd like to share a track with you. My teammate Vicente, or Cenzo as he's known in the music scene, lovingly crafted this track from the sanctity of his beat lab. I'm officially declaring Intrigue the official soundtrack of the August 24 2021 post. So if you want to really get the most out of this entry, you had better be listening to this slick, smart, relaxing tune in the background while you read.
Our experimentally new morning routine continues, and we are already seeing improvements on day 2. I managed to get a full night's sleep last night, but the price was enduring an incredibly weird dream where I was trying to escape an educational children's museum. While Ziggy's warm body wrapped around my feet heated my blanket up like a meteor, I dreamt I was running through swarms of clingy tour guides, fending them off by yelling "I ALREADY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT SPIDERS". Do we have any armchair psychologists out there? I bet you could have a field day with that one.
Marissa is adapting to the early mornings as well. She got through the day with only three brain farts, and being a good sport she has given me full permission to gently roast her for these brain farts for your amusement.
We hit the first brain fart right out of the gate in the morning during breakfast. She opened a new box of Captain Crunch for Rodney upside down. "I was annoyed that the box didn't have the little closing flaps," she said flustered.
The second brain fart would happen later while she was pulling together the final touches on dinner. She set a plate of two freshly tossed chicken caesar salad wraps in front of me. A second later, she yanked the plate away exclaiming "OH I forgot to put the chicken in." The cooked chicken breast remained untouched in the pan while she assembled the first few salad wraps.
The third brain fart occurred in the evening just after we made our way to the couch to watch a movie. My phone chirped with a low battery notification.
"Do you want me to plug your phone in?" said Marissa kindly with her own charging cable at the ready.
"Oh thanks, honey. Yeah that would be good," I replied.
"Hey," she said sweetly turning to meet my eyes. "Today was a good day." And with that, she plugged her own phone into her charger. I held my own battery-depleted phone in my hand confused, waiting for a punchline. She quickly realized what she did and we both bursted into laughter.
To be fair, it was a good day yesterday. The new routine felt energizing, and that carried us into the new week. My work day didn't give me the biggest sense of accomplishment, but I put some good time into trying to understand my team's domain.
It's been tricky, and I can explain that in more detail. I imagine most of us have our own personal benchmarks we use to answer the question Did I do well today? How many chores did you finish? How many emails did you reply to? How many assignments were crossed off and how many tickets did you close? If this describes you, we're one in the same. I have my own personal benchmarks I use to measure how much work I accomplished, but my simplistic measure of success doesn't account well for time spent learning something new. I don't know some of the tools like the back of my hand. I can't intuitively feel where the problem is occurring. I have to probe the darkness with my own theories, and kick them down like a sand castle when I find another nugget of truth. It's good work, but it's hard to feel the same kind of quantifiable satisfaction. I'm slowly, painfully learning to find satisfaction in ending the day with more questions than I started with.
After work I drove Rodney to the ice rink for skating lessons. The chill in the air has a way of helping me clear my head. My eyes followed Rodney take proud marches across the rink. He flashed me a confident thumbs up as he leaned into a glide.
Ice skating rules.
Thanks for stopping by today. Have a great day, everyone.