The Final Countdown

The final countdown is upon us, there are now 365 days left until retirement.

My hopes are that, although this blog has been mostly dead for many years now, I can journal my way through the highs and lows of winding down a full time career in the Market Research Industry. The need to continue to service clients external and internal. The need to cross-train someone new to lead the Operations on the global accounts. The emotional journey of goodbye and farewell to some who I've worked with my entire career, as well as those who I've grown close to in just 6-8 years most recently.

Aiming for a post a week, but depending on what's going on, maybe more or maybe less.

My wife retires in just 14 days!!!  She's beating me to the finish line but this has been our goal since we got married almost 21 years ago.

What lays ahead is definitely some massive research into health insurance (we'll have a gap until Medicare), financial discipline and seeing our spawn head off to college since he'll be graduating in just 60 days!!

And, although I may be retiring from the career that has defined my life, I still may dabble in something part-time to see if I can snag some insurance or just to keep myself active. Who knows.

We do have a cool vacation coming up in September to Grenada, and a couple months after my retirement next year, we're doing 2 luxury weeks in Jamaica to celebrate.

The clock is now ticking, but in a very positive way.

Update from previous post

Karma is a funny animal but it's real

Letting violent anger and frustration breathe for 24+ hours before moving forward is also a very good thing

Also, thank you to the fellow parent that spoke on the kid's behalf recently before I had a chance to. You beat me to the punch by a day or so as I was practicing the above sentence which has taken a lot of self-control as I was about to burn it all down

When Coaches lose the plot that kids baseball, even at 14 years old, is to be FUN and that it's to continue to build the love of the sport and the abilities in these young men as they enter High School, then they really shouldn't be in leadership positions.

Just after I posted below plus more "stuff" happened during a baseball weekend, I got a call from the owner of the organization asking me my thoughts and hearing out my complaints about how things had changed so suddenly with my son's baseball team and the coaches from hell.

I was losing some faith in the "travel baseball" world, and much of it has been restored.

19 months later, another mental health post

I worry a lot about my mental health.  As I've turned 56, I frequently meditate on the types of things that drive who I am and how i live.

There's lots of childhood scars, there's a lifetime of things that happened to me or that I caused myself that impact my life to this very day.

What I don't think anyone prepares you for is that you also take on these scars/issues that your children go through as well. You care so deeply for this human that you helped bring into this world, you raise them to be fearless, bold, brave, only to see that they are a pretty good carbon copy of you and they get hurt/suffer battle wounds in the very same way.

My son is one of the most loving, caring people in the world, it's how we've raised him. His ADHD however, will have him process things that happen to him very deeply and they affect him a lot more than it would for me.  But I can see that he's already built a shield around himself that I worry, just hides the much larger pain he's feeling inside.

After supposedly finding an ideal situation for him with a sports team, it has gone incredibly pear-shaped because the coaches have changed. One coach was kicked to the curb by the other 3 "buddies". How we approach games has now completely changed as well as, although completely within the rules, they decided they wouldn't communicate it to the parents of all the kids. Instead we found out after the game had started already.

It's the classic bully/hazing sort of behavior and it's come about because frankly, this team is NOT a good team.  But we were plugging along, having some success, but in general, 3-16 on the season is not a good feelings, especially for the amount of money everyone is paying for "travel" sports.

Other than the one coach who got booted, the other 3 rarely have a kind word for the kids. They don't build-break-build when errors happen, it's much easier to just yell at them, pull them from the game mid-inning and sit them to make them "think" about their error.

But now apparently they feel that there's 2-3 kids who just aren't able to perform. So they are now benched and we're playing by the rules that MLB plays by.  In order for you to go into the game (if you're on the bench), someone has to come out for the rest of the game.

Normally, I would accept these decisions as, it IS how High School ball is played and these kids are now HS aged. Its just that nothing was said and it looked like those 2-3 kids were targeted.  Again, if they actually WERE the 2-3 worse kids on the team, it would make sense, but these 3 bullies have decided that it's only their clique who gets to play.  Based on the actual performance data, there are 5-6 kids who are all about even at the bottom of the stats, based on batting average, pitching and fielding percentages.  But my son is one of the 2-3 who are now, showing up like good soldiers, expecting not to play each weekend.

2 of the bullies kids have all the tell-tale signs of, "I play because my Dad coaches".  1 never makes the weeknight practice for whatever reason and his "on field numbers" are not much better than my kid's. The other, makes many errors on the field (may lead our team in number of errors), kicks dirt, puts his head down and just doesn't give a crap. He can't catch a ball that bounces in front of him if his life depended on it. Last weekend, he hit a pop-up in fair territory and didn't even bother to run it out.

Last night, surprise, a new kid shows up who is now on our team for the rest of the season.  Apparently he was playing for another team in our club and they don't need him. Normally that wouldn't be weird except that we then find out that the kid lives by one of the 3 coaches so he was already "one of their clique".

This stuff stinks to high heaven and I can only imagine what our Coach is telling the management of our club as to my son's performance and how they desperately needed another body to help out.

My son is upset by this.  But he's being a young man about it. Shows up to practice, helps out during the game with warm-ups or whatever, cheers his teammates on.  But I'm saving all of my evidence.  Tryouts for next year are just over a week away.

My point to all of this is that my mental health is taking a hit here.  I can't sleep, I hurt FOR my son (who is hurting for sure as well), I talk to him daily about the right mindset to have even if these 3 "men" treat him unfairly and unevenly compared to all of the other kids. I'm training him how to cope but I'm positive that I'm not teaching him how to mentally cope because frankly, this has made me a wreck.  Kids are malleable and they DO process and manage these pains differently but I hurt SO MUCH for him right now and I am taking it personally.  It also means that I have to take my time to construct my arguments about the coaching style and actions and not take it out on the other kids who are not good players but are just playing a game and don't really have an impact on my son. It's their Dads who are horrible people and insensitive and frankly, massive bullies.

We'll see how this plays out. I am definitely going on the offensive soon though because I'm not going to spend money to go to Michigan and Indiana for tournaments to watch my kid sit on the bench for two solid weekends.

Mental Health is taking a hit with COVID

By no means am I a mental health expert, but I am a human being that, at times, struggles with my own brain.

For the most part, I think I've held up pretty well during this pandemic outbreak but with the resurgence and with people fairly close to me (not relatives, but living near our home) testing positive, the thoughts that "We're being surrounded" and "there's no escape, it's inevitable" IS taking its toll on my mental well-being.

For the last couple of nights, I have awoken from a nightmare of myself struggling to breathe.  It is frightening to say the least and I find myself drowsily checking to make sure I really can breathe and that my airway is clear.

In late March/start of April 2018, I was hospitalized with a double whack of pneumonia and an undetermined virus after traveling back from India via Dubai. It was scary. I could barely breathe, my legs had swollen up to enormous size as I was retaining all kinds of fluids and my immune system had been compromised.  

So, I know these feelings of which I dream and based on what folks are saying happens if you catch COVID and are high-risk, I am at risk for this happening if I catch it.

I rarely live my life in fear. It's not who I am. But the feeling of helplessness I had in 2018, of having to be in quarantine, keep distance from my family, including my 10 year old son at the time, was something that in NON-Pandemic times was something that could break a man.  Amplify that by the entire ICU wing of the hospital being overrun by cases like me and it escalates that feeling exponentially.

Even has COVID has been around, we are taking extra precautions but still not living like hermits.  We socialize at a distance, are very careful with who we let into our home and avoid all large events and traveling.

But as the Patriarch of this family, this shit is taking it's toll.  To the "fuck mask" people, why can't you just realize that this is how a decent majority of people feel? You can sit there and say it's no worse than the flu all you want but it IS worse than the flu. You have the right to be as free as you want but you cannot complain with businesses shutting down, schools going back to remote learning and restrictions being put in place all because your fee fees where hurt in the beginning and as a country we couldn't do what New Zealand did (and had to do again) to stamp this thing out.

But these seeds of distrust were sown at the highest levels of our Government. The same people who downplayed the severity of this are the same ones now attacking an election results that didn't fall their way.  If you're hitching your wagon to that train of idiots, well, when the "fuck your feelings" truck comes back around to run your ass over in the future, you can't complain.

History will show that the head idiot in charge right now truly was the worst ever. His inability to suck it up and deal with the truth and yet again, spin lies, falsehoods and misinformation have set back decent political discourse in this country for decades.  The genie is out of the bottle now, he's running rampant and fooling people. But hey, he tells it like it is, except that everything he tells is bold-faced lies.