phenom’s world

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Regards,

phenom

I don’t know.

It’s like my eyes are being pulled into my head while a frying pan is simultaneously smacking my brain.  It’s strain and pain and frustration and irritation and it just doesn’t. Fucking. Go. Away.  It’s meds that mess with me so I change them and the new ones bring a whole new level of medieval on my ass. 

Worrying about my kids and money and house and trips and my health and my job and did I fuck up when I rejected an escrow account and the mortgage is only nine days late.  It’s I just got home and I’m hungry and I should be outside with the boys but all I want to do is lie on the couch and close my eyes and bask in the silence. 

It’s having to walk through a supernova of flourescent lights to get to the john because design quality moved next to us a year ago.  A 30-inch LCD that has the brightness turned down to a point where shadows are all I work with and holy crap that helped a little bit. 

It’s the break from all that that cool breezes and warm fresh air provide.

It’s the fact that the cool breezes and warm fresh air didn’t help at all at last night’s tee ball game.

It’s that sleep is my only respite and jobs and money and house and kids and cats and plastic keep me from enjoying it as much as I can.

It’s that I can’t fucking do the things I enjoy doing every day.

It’s that my doctor hasn’t called me back. 

I don’t know.

There’s been a number of things going on in my life, including a holiday season that was grand, albeit too short, a fun trip to warm weather with some wonderful friends/family, and the general survival of yet another cold, snowy winter where I wonder why the blue hell I still live in this state.

My toughest challenge yet is, unfortunately, job-related.  Before the Christmas break I got my annual review and it was less desirable than I thought it would be.  This led to some general panic for my wife and I, and considering it came two days before my holiday break made it that much more… joyous (sarcasm implied and expressed).

However, once I got back to work I learned that reviews like mine may have been the norm and not the exception, which I guess is good.  We still haven’t been through the cuts we’ve been told we’ll be going through this month, but I feel a little less vulnerable than I did a month ago.  Hopefully all goes well.

If not, for that matter, even if it does, I’ve been working to sort of reinvent myself in a way.  I have many interests and I’m trying to find ways to make the most of them should the worst happen.  There are a lot of fine people on social networking sites such as Twitter who have, unbeknownst to them, given me a lot of tools to help myself become more reliant on my own skills and talents to make my life more enjoyable and less stressful as it relates to the work I do.

So while the uncertainty of my near future fills my thoughts much of the day, I feel confident that my professional life is headed in the right direction in the long run regardless of what happens in the next couple of weeks.

And yes, you can follow me on Twitter. 

Sounds appealing enough, right?  Sounds like something you might be all over at your local Starbucks, too, I’d imagine.  Being a strictly black (Pike Place, if you must know) coffee drinker means that double chocolate coffee means nothing to me, but let’s just imagine for a moment that “Double Chocolate Coffee Oatmeal Stout” describes what was in your brown bottle.

Yeah, really.

Founders is a Grand Rapids, MI-based brewery that makes some interesting brews, the most interesting of which is the Breakfast Stout, which was introduced to me by a fellow twitterer who happens to live about an hour or so away from me from time to time.  This guy’s pretty hardcore with his brew and regularly sips on what I call “mood beer,” as I tend to have to be in the mood for the beer he chews on drinks regularly.  Nevertheless, I’m always willing to try something new, and after seeing Founders Breakfast Stout on tap at a fantastic Detroit BBQ place, where I was (sadly) there for a work lunch, I remembered to hunt some down.  My local beer store, bless their souls, had plenty of four-packs on the shelf.

I’ll tell ya, this stuff is fantastic.  My wife described its taste as “dark chocolate coffee,” which is spot-on.  It leaves a chocolate coffee aftertaste which is pleasant and which helps keep the flavor consistent.  It’s 8.3% ABV, and it made me want to sit in my cold garage and drink myself warm.  Good stuff.  If you see it, try it.

I’ve decided to start over here.  Right now, however, it’s time to get the boys pj’d and toothbrushed.  My old stuff is still around, but it’s over at http://blog.phenomsworld.com

So yeah, I’ll be back shortly.  Stay tuned.