I don’t like ever feeling like anyone’s upset with me ever. It’s one of my least favorite things in the world. I know it happens, of course: I’m human, I fuck up, I piss people off or hurt their feelings or what have you. But I try very very hard to make sure that happens as infrequently as I can, both because I genuinely don’t want others to feel upset because of something I’ve done and because it makes me feel all icky inside, like my guts have been coated in a spicy self-recrimination salsa and heavily breaded with angst crumbs.

I have to say, though, that I feel like I handled today’s not-quite-a-tiff like an actual, honest-to-Jebus adult. You might think to yourself: “Well, Allen, you’re 38 years old, so you totally should be handling these sorts of things like an adult.” And you’d be right to think I should, yet incredibly wrong to think that I do.

Today, however, I listened to what my friend had to say, and I apologized (even as he said an apology wasn’t necessary — to me, it was: I’d acted like a douche and should, therefore, apologize). I told him I’d try to be better about this sort of thing in the future and asked him to call me on it if I do it again.

Then I made him hug it out with me, because that’s what secure, adult men do after spats.

Now I have to figure out how to apply that same level of calm, coherent listening-and-discussing-without-letting-it-destroy-my-fragile-self-esteem thing to my more personal interactions. Even after twelve years of spending every day together, I still let the tiniest argument with Terry (or most anyone close to me) send me into a flaming spiral of depression and self-flagellation. When Terry’s upset with me — which doesn’t happen incredibly often, but still more often that I’d like, as I seem to be a fairly infuriating person to live with (sorry, Terry!) — I take it as if my entire being is at fault. When I piss her off, it’s as if I’m the universe’s lowest form of bottom-of-sneaker scum. I have exactly one feeling which even remotely compares to that awfulness, and that’s the feeling that I’ve disappointed my daughters. I’m honestly not sure which is worse.

Maybe now that I have more proof that I can handle the disapproval of others and know that it won’t kill me, that I can look it in the face and not shrink from it (at least to some limited degree with people I like and respect), I can put that same be-a-damn-grownup principle to work the next time I make Terry want to chuck a shoe at my head.

I have a feeling I won’t have to wait long to give it a try.

[1] OK, I like 95%+ of my co-workers, so that’s not a surprise.

With my eyes closed.

I mean, let’s be honest:  no one’s gonna mistake me for Steve Perry or Chris Cornell anytime soon.   For one thing, I’m way better-looking than either one of those schlubs.  But clearly my long-held belief that  ”I can’t sing, period“…well, it just ain’t true.  Who knew all I needed was Rock Band and some practice?

Yes, that makes me feel like an idiot.

But there’s good news to be had here, because it’s made me really tighten down my eating habits and begin ramping up my exercise habits.  Over the last three or four weeks, I’ve had no pasta at all (which is really, really bizarre for me).  I’ve had, I think, two dessert-like things, both of which were at my weekly company meetings.  I’ve had probably three cups of coffee.  I’m trying to introduce veggies into my diet on a more regular basis.  I’m really, really trying hard to eat better, though I still have a ways to go, especially with the veggies.

It’s paid off a bit, though — I’ve dropped six pounds since the last time I was in my doctor’s office a month ago.

That weight loss — which I sincerely hope will continue as I eat better and exercise more — is tremendous, because dropping some of the extra weight I carry around my mid-section will, by all accounts, do wonders for my blood sugar numbers.  I’m by no means obese (even if the nerdy, fat 13-year-old in my head likes to argue that point), but I do carry my extra poundage in the one place it’s medically worst for men to carry it, and the more weight I can drop, the better off I’m going to be, and the better my body is going to work, and the better I’m going to feel.

I don’t want to pay too much attention to the numbers, because that way lies madness. I am, however, going to continue to do what I’m doing, and hopefully do it even better, and trust that the numbers will continue to fall.  That six pounds might not be tremendous in and of itself, but it’s validation that — possibly for the first time in my life — I’m on the right path, healthily speaking.

Yes, we now have matching earrings because we are just that damn adorable.

Instead, partially inspired by an offhand snarky comment from one of my co-workers (”Don’t come back married!”), we got married.  We stood in a dark stairwell in the courthouse, wearing jeans and sandals (her) and sneakers (me) and enormous smiles, and we repeated back our vows to the Justice of the Peace, and we exchanged the simple silver bands we’d purchased.  Then we went home and told our parents, and we had dinner at the Outback Steakhouse that night, and we spent our joyous wedding night in our little rental house.

I’ve never for a single second regretted either the circumstances of the wedding or thought that marrying Terry was the wrong decision.  Not for a second.  Far and away the best decision I’ve ever made.

I love you, sweetheart, and hope for several more decades as amazing and fulfilling as the first one.

Now: We were in a one-car accident this morning.

Road conditions around here have been fairly consistently treacherous for the last week or so, and this morning Terry told me there were black ice warnings. I told her I’d be fine — I’m a very careful driver anyway, and I figured that most of the roads I’d be traveling on between the house and the office would have been traveled enough to have warmed them up.

Problem is, that didn’t apply to the road right outside our neighborhood.

Kelsey and I got in the Jeep and headed off for school, turning left out of our neighborhood. Fifty yards later, I hit a slick of ice and started sliding. My first thought was “Hey, y’know, no big deal, I’ll stop sliding here in a second.” But I didn’t. I fishtailed back and forth for a few seconds before shooting off the right shoulder, into a drainage ditch and headfirst into an embankment — given that the mud we drove through probably slowed us down a little, I’m guessing we hit the embankment at around thirty miles per hour.

As soon as we were stopped, I turned around immediately to check on Kelsey (all I could think once it became obvious an accident was coming was “Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey”)… who was perfectly fine, and only upset because the impact made her drop the fuzzy little frog she was playing with.

I called Terry as soon as I was sure both Kelsey and I were physically okay, but I had to cut the call short because of some unexpected help (Terry has her own version of events which describe that far too short phone call, so I’ll let her tell that part of the story). I complain sometimes about where we live and talk about missing Boston, but I’m fairly sure what happened next wouldn’t have happened had this accident occured up north: not sixty seconds after the accident, a guy pulled off the side of the road in his ginormous Chevy truck and helped drag me out of the ditch. And the state trooper who showed up to check on us was my neighbor — who thankfully didn’t write us up for having expired out-of-state tags (a situation which was fixed this afternoon). Terry called a tow truck (thank you again, Beth, for the AAA membership you got Terry for her birthday)… and we waited for quite awhile, since the tow trucks around here were quite busy this morning. Supposedly there were numerous accidents all around our area; the tow guy had trouble navigating the roads himself to come get us.

The truck wasn’t really damaged, surprisingly, outside of a blown right front tire, and even that we were able to get re-inflated. I was so, so, so lucky: there was no one else on the road at the time I started skidding, and where I went off the road I managed to split right between a row of mailboxes and a telephone pole. Where I hit the embankment, I was two feet to the right of a cement drainage pipe. Even the fact that I was driving the Jeep and not my Mazda — the Mazda would have been severely damaged by the crash, and quite possibly so would Kelsey and I. All in all, if I’ve got to be in a car accident — especially with my kid in the car — this was a good one to have.

In between the time I wrote that post and the time it was supposed to be published, more than 30 people were massacred at Virginia Tech.

I wrestled with whether or not posting such a piece of inconsequential fluff was appropriate given what was going on in Blacksburg; ultimately, as you can see, I decided to go ahead with it — if I tried to stop posting out of respect for every terrible thing that happened, I’d never write anything again.  In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter one way or the other whether I posted that article or not, I reasoned, so up it went.

But it did matter.  It mattered to me.

Much like I’d imagine most every other rational, feeling person reading the news yesterday, I felt positively nauseated by what happened.  It just made no sense to me.  I can wrap my head around reading news stories about dozens of civilians getting killed in Baghdad — horrendous though it is, Baghdad’s a war zone and I can understand the types of things that happen there.  It’s tragic, but it’s also expected (and possibly all the more tragic for it).

But what happened yesterday, the utter randomness of it… that I can’t wrap my head around.  I can’t understand why someone thinks they need to kill that many innocent people before taking their own life.  I simply do not get it.

And this particular incident has shaken me far more than any previous school shooting ever did.  I think that it’s because unlike when, say, Columbine happened, I’m now a parent.  It’s made me think more:  thinking of those kids who got shot for no other reason than being in the wrong classroom when some psychopath decided it was time to make his mark on the world… thinking of the parents of those kids, watching the news, terrified, then getting the call that their child had been senselessly murdered…

It made what I wrote yesterday insignificant.  It made the majority of what I ever write feel insignificant.

I know it’s not entirely so, of course; people need entertainment to help distract them from thinking too much of the likes of what happened yesterday, and I like to discuss that entertainment and to try occasionally to provide some of it myself.  But those pointless murders really helped put what I do in some sense of perspective, to remind me of what’s truly important and what isn’t.  Just because writing about pop culture isn’t “important” doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing it, but I’m reminded how lucky I am that I’m able to do think about the trivial so much, that my worries aren’t greater, than my family is safe and happy and healthy.

My most heartfelt sympathies to the families of the victims at Virginia Tech.

Back to the frivolities of pop culture tomorrow.  Tonight, I’m going to go home and give my family a few dozen extra hugs.

Do or Do Not World Headquarters is relocating to beautiful Greensboro, North Carolina. Like, next week.

The impending move has been the single biggest reason behind the paucity of posting here over the last couple of weeks. Remember in my last post when I said I didn’t have the brainpower to actually put much in the way of coherent thoughts together? That’s why. I’ve had things to say yet neither the time nor the focus to say them. So sorry — I hope to find that condition rectified after we’re settled into the new digs. Things should be a little closer to normal around here come September.

I’m excited to be returning to my roots, in a sense, moving back to the South after our three-year sojourn to New England. The winters here have never sat well with me, and the cost of living has sat even less well. I’ll once again be in a cultural environment which, while incredibly problematic for me as a left-winger, feels comfortable in the way, say, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off does: I can see the problems and the inadequacies, but I’m still able to enjoy it anyway.

Still, the slow dismantling of the life Terry and I have built here over the last three years saddens me. More than I was expecting it to.

I know that we have much ahead to look forward to and much to be excited about, but while we’re in the middle of cutting ties (well, perhaps “loosening” ties would be a better way to put it) and divesting ourselves of extraneous crap, I can’t quite get to that excited-for-the-future place. Right now I’m just a little depressed, noting every time, for instance, I walk into a building I know I’ll likely never walk into again. I even felt a little twinge when I drove past Gilette Stadium this morning, and I’ve never ever seen a game there — but it’s part of the landscape of my life here, even if a small one, and I’ll miss it.

Two weeks from now we’ll be well and truly into our new lives, our new house, in North Carolina and we’ll have time to stop, to relax, to breathe, to enjoy the bright future we’re both so confident lies ahead. But for now, all we are is tired and stressed and already missing the people and the places that have come to mean so much to us.

“Daddy, daddy! We got you a present! It’s a secret, SSSSSSHHH!!! It’s a bear!!”

My girls (with more than a little assistance from their amazing mommy) got me the most rockin’ Father’s Day present I’ve gotten yet:

Kelsey picked out the bear (with approval from Laurel) — Kelsey chose this particular bear because it looks like Sleepy Bear, her friend who’s spent every night with her since she was 18 months old. Terry picked out the costume (again with approval from the girls), but I think that one was pretty much a no-brainer, don’t you?

Thank you, Laurel, Kelsey (who told me “Happy Father’s Day” no less than 300 times yesterday) and Terry, for the totally fantastic Father’s Day (which included breakfast in bed, a two-toddlers-on-one-Daddy wrestling match, and trips to an art supply store, a comic book store and a swing by our amazing local ice cream place). I certainly don’t need special days like this one to know how much you care, but I truly wasn’t going to complain about being showered with all of that love and affection.

doop dee doo. doodle-eee-doo.

Done? OK, good.

As those of you readers living in New England are well aware, it has now rained for 517 consecutive days here in the northeastern U.S. We went from the gray of winter to the gray rain of spring, and I swear it feels like it’s just going to stay this way until it slides right back into winter again. The weather here has, to be quite frank, sucked of late.

And all that stuff I should’ve done to the basement to prepare for all of this rain? Yeah, that’s right — didn’t do a damn bit of it.

I came home early from work today to try to help Terry with the newest round of flooding, to move stuff away from the standing water areas and start getting rid of the crap in the basement we don’t need or has been damaged beyond repair. Unfortunately, that includes several thousand dollars worth of my comic books. (That’s the value I’ve paid for them over the years, not what I could get if I tried to sell them now. Especially given the fact that so many of them are, y’know, sopping wet.)

So I went through three longboxes of comics and threw out all of the ones that were sodden and stuck together — three garbage bags full. Luckily, there weren’t too many of those that I really felt all that bad about chucking out (a significant run of Uncanny X-Men from around 1989-91 excepted). Ninety percent of the rest of what was in those longboxes is now earmarked for donation. (Question for any of you, ’specially you New England folk: do you know of a literacy organization that might be willing to accept a gift of several hundred comic books?)

I kept maybe fifty comics out of probably pushing 1000 that I went through, either comics I plan to use for art or story reference or ones to which I had any kind of sentimental attachment. That I kept so few says to me I probably need to get rid of the comics I buy on a more regular basis, preferably by passing them on to other readers — and it also says something to me about the quality of most of those books. There was a large percentage of comics of which I had absolutely no memory past the cover, comics which clearly had made no lasting impression on me whatsoever, and a larger percentage of books I just didn’t care to re-read.

I threw out comics I’ve had with me for as long as twenty-five years. I threw out the issue of All-Star Squadron #3 I distinctly remember reading on the the flight I took from Pensacola to Birmingham by myself when I was eleven years old. I threw out books whose covers have been burned into my brain for msot of my life (even if their contents haven’t been). But it was time to let go — these relics of an earlier me were adding nothing to my life anymore except more boxes to be stored in my basement.

It seems like I should feel worse about throwing away and giving away these things that were so important to me when I was younger. But I don’t. One of the main tenets of Buddhist philosophy is that of non-attachment, and I’ve been violating the hell out of that dictum by keeping (amongst other things) hundreds of pounds of paper that are largely meaningless to me now. And that attachment stemmed mainly from the fact that I was just used to having these books around, not from any true sentimentality or appreciation of quality.

So farewell, my four-color friends. You’ve been a part of my life since before I even sprouted grass on the prairie, but it’s time to say goodbye. I hope those of you I can give away will live on in another basement after providing some entertainment and education to someone new.