Sore

I've been battling a very sore throat the last two days. I stayed home from work yesterday to try and sleep it off, and while it did improve in the late afternoon/evening, by the time I was going to bed and throughout the night, it was back again with a vengeance.

Today it seems as bad if not a bit worse. I called the doctor and have an appointment scheduled for this afternoon. So now I've just got to make it from now to then. And the I've got to wait for whatever medicine they prescribe me to do its job.

Perhaps I've got strep throat. All I know is that right now, I can't swallow without very strong pain and I haven't eaten all morning as a consequence. So, my energy level isn't very strong either. I guess I should try to get some office work done--stuff that isn't very taxing--but I just want to sleep. I'm sure I'll pay for putting things off later.

Something inside me is broken

That sounds overly dramatic, but I am feeling pretty vulnerable right now and that is the phrase that comes to mind.

The past two days, I have completely lost my temper around my kids in ways that make me very ashamed. One instance is due to childishness on everyone's part (though I am not supposed to be the child here) and the other one was due to my temper being released much too quickly.

Ultimately, what so often causes me to act in such a juvenile and contemptible way is the fact that my kids see fit to argue with me on things I have just answered them about. If someone is eating an apple in the van, comes home, throws the unfinished apple away, and then asks if they can have a different snack, I'm going to say "No." And then they start whining and mewling and trying to give me bullshit reasoning about how they didn't know they were going to be wasting anything. And it simply doesn't matter what I say or how I try to explain the idiotic flaws in their statement. They are too busy contradicting me.

Its the audacity of it all that drives me to such anger. How can they ask me a question, knowing completely that they don't CARE the answer I give? And they don't. If they really cared about the answer, if they really needed to ask the question to achieve approval, then they might actually consider the answer that I deliver. But they only do it as some sort of meaningless, hollow formality because we've trained them (at least this much) to ask questions and not go off half-cocked and do whatever the hell they want. But it amounts to the same thing in the end, because I'm simply wasting my breath and my time flapping my lips about some answer they don't like and they don't care about.

I can't stand it when pre-pubescent kids think they are smarter than me or have the right to contradict me--especially when it is my own children. I have tried to be fair and I've tried to teach them the reasons behind the choices that I make. But if it happens to be something they don't agree with, they feel free to argue with me about it.

(I really shouldn't be writing this and making it public, I guess, but I've just got to get this out. It is eating me inside and its just going to cause more anger and more tempers.)

I don't know where I went wrong, because it must have come from me, right? It is my responsibility to raise them correctly, so if they act this way, it can't be anyone's fault but my own. And I don't know how to fix it. They get angry, they don't respond to spankings, and it is surely due to a pattern of reactions that I have created over the years in similar circumstances. Maybe, maybe it'll change as they age but who's to say? I am so afraid inside that it is going to escalate into much more dangerous behavior once older kids are confronted with much more dangerous choices and much more significant consequences.

Every time this happens, I am so furious with myself and I try to think of ways to prevent it from happening again. But I just don't know what to do.

Awesomeness

It's been a while, but I finally got a bit of updating done on Raising the AWESOME Family.

Check it out here.

I think that will satisfy me for today. I know that it's been a light weekend, but I just don't want to spend more time blogging today. If I did, I'd just complain about stuff that happened during bedtime. (I almost did, but I'm trying to talk myself out of it. If you can't say something nice, don't blog about anything at all.)

Drama and (not total) darkness

If I could conjure up the drama shown in these movie clips, even my most mundane moments of creating a pedestrian blog post would be captivating.

I apologize to the Earth that I forgot to remember Earth Hour. Though most of our lights were out at the time, as we were getting kids to bed. But the 8:30 to 9:30 hour came and went and neither Lynda nor I turned off the lights. (More to the pity, I suppose.)

Still, any old hour will be just as helpful won't it? (Or maybe not?)

And, yeah, that's it for me tonight.

"The Perfect as the Enemy of the Good"

I didn't know what I was going to write about today and it almost became a crisis. I sat a few minutes ago and thought to myself . . . do I want to let this day go by without a post? Do I want to let go of the arbitrary idea of writing a post every day? Let's say I accomplish it. What does that mean? Does it make me better or worse or nothing at all?

But I figured I'd at least put in an effort.

But when I sat down to write, well, what?

So, I flipped over to Blogger and looked at my Dashboard. I selected the drafts item and the computer pulled up all of the ideas I've started but never completed. All of the posts that started out with an inspiration but maybe never went past a title. Some have some quickly jotted notes. Some have a few paragraphs and then . . . stop . . . 

I decided to try and do something with this one, based mostly on the title that was sitting there. I remember that when I first started this post, back in January, I was struck by the fact that I heard that phrase "the perfect as the enemy of the good" several times in one week. And I don't think I had ever heard it before.

Based on the timing, I suspect that one aspect of this phrase came from something about President Obama's inauguration and speculation about what sort of president he might be. As I interpret the phrase, we cannot let the idea of a perfect solution inhibit our ability to BEGIN down the path of accomplishing a task. Essentially, its a restatement of that old phrase--"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Or, you can't let the forest prevent you from appreciating the trees. And other stuff like that.

Continuing with the political angle, we all know that the economy is in a mess. And there are lots of ideas on how to fix it. And Obama's opponents have many opinions about how he is tasking others and how those others are tackling the problem. But with a problem so large, how does one begin? And what is the best solution to such a complicated problem that stretches out in all directions? I guess one solution that folds into "the perfect as the enemy of the good" is that we/they should start doing something rather than continue thinking about what ELSE we might be doing.

Lynda and I are people that want to be right and to Get It Right. We have, at times, struggled against the need to accomplish perfection. But I am better able to throw something out there and refine it later. (As evidenced--or not?--by the majority of my blog posts over the last several years.) She is more apt to be paralyzed by the unfinished nature of her work and the details of everything between Step 1 and Step 1000.

So, my advice to all of you (and you KNOW who you are) is to take that step. Don't be paralyzed by the unknown or the unfinished path that stretched ahead. Take the step and look for the good as you travel down the path. You might still reach something much more perfect than you expected.