Today sucked.

I had an awful day today. I had to work excessively hard on a task that didn't need to be done, but I was not made aware of it until after I had finished. Then, I had to run around from building to building with nobody explaining to me what exactly I was supposed to be doing, and ended up getting shots that I didn't need. Then I had to work outside in the cold for several more hours. The day just wouldn't end.

The day started off great, but quickly went downhill. This morning I was doing heel-hooks on the pull-up bars and kicked a guy in the face. It was awesome, but after that, pure aggrivation.

During a forty minute period when I could relax, I thought about how I got to be here and how I wouldn't change a thing. I could have finished grad school. I could have been in my second year of teaching (Where I would have been miserable, but I'll save that for a later entry because I have some long rants about the failures of the education system and why I don't want any part of it). Nope, instead I'm here. Aggrivated by stupid people.

January 2010, I returned to my house in Norfolk after a trip to visit my grandfather in South Carolina. I didn't pick up my cat, Dicken, from the kennell like usual because I wanted to get back to Norfolk to hang out with some people before school started. My mother called me that evening to tell me the vet noticed some disturbing behavior from my cat during his stay there. He didn't eat much and he vomitted several times. Dicken had already become pretty skinny in his old age, and now the vet suspected he might have some sort of cancer. I of course was saddened by this news and actually got a little choked up after the phone call. Very few things ever elicit an emotional response from me, but that was one of them.

I prayed that, whenever it was Dicken's time to go, I would be there with him.

A few months later, I quit grad school. I wasn't happy and wanted to pursue something I wanted to do, not something I was doing because I felt I had to do something. I moved back home to my famiy and my kitty. Being back home clearly made Dicken happy. From March until August, he started eating more, put on weight, and was more active.

In August, he started to decline. We didnt' notice at first, but he stopped eating dry food. Eventually he stopped eating canned food. At some point, I noticed that it had been forever since I heard him purr. He had an overactive salivary gland that caused him to drool whenever he was really happy. He hadn't drooled in a long time either. Something was wrong, and eventually we took him to the vet on September 11, 2010. Dicken didn't come back from the vet.

Like I said, I don't get emotional over anything. I hadn't cried since one of the younger elementary school years (I just realized that coincidentally, we adopted Dicken early in my second grade year). I cried that day though. I cried a lot. There was a good hour in that room at the vet's where I had difficulty formulating words, much less a coherent sentence. The next two days, I'd just lose it out of nowhere too.

But I remembered praying that God would let me be there with Dicken at the end. If I had been teaching, I would have been somewhere else in the country. The school year would have just started, and it would have been uncertain that I could make it home. God answered me in a wierd way, but it was worth it.

Whenever I have bad days out here, and I think of all the stupid shit I have to put up with sometimes, and I think of easier things I could be doing, I remember being there for a friend. Totally worth it.

An old house

I was bored earlier and looking on facebook to kill time until the season finale of South Park came on. "Mansion on the Hill" by Bruce Springsteen, off Nebraska started playing on my iTunes. The first verse goes:

There's a place out on the edge of town sir
Risin' above the factories and the fields
Now ever since I was a child I can remember that mansion on the hill

That line conjured memories from my childhood of a house I used to pass all the time on Route 10. It wasn't a mansion on a hill, but like so many words that bring back old memories, it didn't have to make sense. I remembered a hosue from my childhood.

That house is no longer there, but I remember it vividly. There was a small wall around the front yard. At the entrance to the driveway, the wall broke into a door-less gate. At the edge of each wall there were statues of eagles perched on orbs. The house was either a short two-story house or a one-story house with a tall attic. The walls were stone. Behind the house was the thick forest that most of Chester used to be. You can tell the area was heavily wooded because of the forested subdivision nearby. The tall trees surrounding the house used hide envelope it with their limbs.

When I was a kid, I was riding in the car with my mother. I pointed out the house and how I thought it was cool and wanted to live in a house like that. She told me that when my uncle was a kid, he would say the same thing about it.

Today the house is gone. Much of the forest has been cut down. There is now a large neighborhood for retirees in its place. Driving around my hometown, I often long for how small Chester used to be. Unfortunately, unlike Bruce, I can no longer park on a back road and look up at my mansion on a hill.