Skip to main content

Uneventful Days

"Papa! Mama! I got a match!"

Osamu was so proud. Kenzo helped him get a match. That made me proud. And I told him.

Tonight I wrapped up work at 6:07 p.m. I'm officially off at 6:00, but I have this bad habit of telling myself, "Just a little more and then I'll close it up and go downstairs and join Eri and the boys for dinner and do family time." It gets past 6:30 sometimes.

That's a really bad habit. That's me taking my good fortune for granted, the amazing fortune that I work from home and don't have to commute or abide by in-person company culture. It's also me taking my family life for granted.

This evening I ended my work day with a walk. I was at my desk for an extended period. Since lunchtime I think. It's terrible that I forget. I forget to step away and get fresh air more and more. Today was such a gorgeous late-summer day. I've got the windows open and as I stare at my tasks on my computer I can kinda convince myself I'm enjoying the season, but in reality I'm lacking balance. Sometimes I'm good at taking appropriate breaks and going outside to refresh and sometimes I'm not. Recently it's been not great.

I still get my ten-thousand steps in. Somehow. More and more it's during my lunch break or late at night. I know I should and can take spaced out breaks throughout my work day.

It frightens me to think (and I do think about this) that a year from now, five years from now, or on my deathbed, that someone (maybe even myself) will ask, "Can you tell me about September 12, 2022?" Because I won't remember it. Sure, I'll have memories about today. Maybe. But I won't be able to access the specific memories that made today special, and there are so many.

I deeply fear the uneventful day. What is that? As I live my life each day is full of events, events that I cherish. And yet, days and weeks go by and I can barely describe one thing that made any of it eventful.

No more uneventful days. That's the reason for this blog. For most of my life I've kept journals of one form or another. This blog is the current form. If a day is uneventful, if I can't think of even one tiny thing that happened or a thought that I had that could capture the moment, slow down time, and help me share with myself and whoever happens to be listening, that this life is happening, then what is this all for?

Monday, September 12, 2022 was eventful. I worked hard at the job I love, from my desk in my home that I love, talking with the people I work with that I love, upstairs from the wife and boys that I love, in the neighborhood I love. There's a longer version of this love train but I'll digress here.

At 6:07 p.m. I closed my laptop, spun my desk chair around, and opened the lid on my "special box". That's where I keep special things; passports, my father's watch, official seals for stamping documents, foreign currency, and a few other special items. One of those items is the pack of playing cards from Caesar's Tahoe that I got in 1987. I use them to play Match Game with the boys, but I keep them in the special box because, well, they're special.

When Osamu, who's not great at playing games yet, exclaimed, "Papa, mama! I got a match!" and Kenzo looked at me with his knowing eye because he knows I helped, it made the day eventful.


Also, tonight's dessert was grapes. Osamu likes to eat the skins off the grapes first, save them in his bowl, and eat the skinless grapes last. I love it and tried to take a picture. For some reason he didn't want that documented.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not About Baseball

I stayed up past my bedtime again last night. I almost made it. I watched a couple of episodes of Ted Lasso and came to a good stopping point where I was satisfied with myself for enjoying some quiet TV time with my favorite show and even though it was after midnight, I was confident I could still get a pretty good night's sleep.  But no. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to just lay on the living room carpet and put on a movie. I saw the first seven or eight minutes of Goodfellas and then I woke up when the end credits were rolling with Sid Vicious' is cover of My Way . I brush my teeth and I can see the light of day already shining in through the bathroom window. "It’s almost the longest day of the year," I told myself, to at least rationalize why I'm brushing my teeth and crawling into bed at this hour. I was trying to minimize the mental anguish I regularly put on myself for not just going to bed like I should. I told Eri that I was thinking a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sendai vs. Tokushima

Osamu said he had to go pee, and I make it a habit to believe him most of the time. Another habit I have is taking him to go pee, much of the time.  When we came out of the restroom I decided it was time for a beer, so with Osamu holding my hand we waltzed over to the food concession and I was checking out the selection, and the prices. Seven hundred yen for a draft beer. I had a feeling. It was only 500 for a whiskey cocktail (whiskey with water on the rocks) but I wasn't about to be that much of a derelict this early with my four-year-old son in tow. The tickets were free, the seats aren't bad, might as well spend seven bucks on a beer. The problem was that the dude next to us with his little boy about the same age as Mumu-chan loudly and with braggadocio you don't often see in these parts ordered a Blue Hawaii snow cone for his kid. I heard this and panicked. Last weekend at Michinoku Park I got a Blue Hawaii snow cone for Osamu and he loved it.  I looked down at my l...
1 comment
Read more

Overpriced Highball for the Big Guy

I keep falling asleep at my desk and waking up all groggy and surly in the middle of night, stumbling downstairs to brush my teeth without waking anyone, and slinking back up the steps and into bed. So I was the last one up again this morning, but I made up for it by quickly getting ready and taking the boys out on a Sunday morning walk to look for bugs. Kenzo has been particularly keen on capturing another lizard. He doesn't understand that lizard season is ending and those guys are becoming more and more rare. He got his hopes up when we came across a little one walking up some woodsy steps. After that we took a break. Eri's sister and her husband stopped by to grab the car seats that the boys just graduated from. Their little girl Emika is just now big enough to start using one and next spring she's gonna have a brand new baby brother or sister who will also need a car seat, so the timing worked out nice for all of us. Emika apparently loves Thomas the Tank Engine (who d...
Post a Comment
Read more