StephenBergstrom

We'll see what happens.

Okay, so we're now just about 3/4 through 2013, and any hope I may have once held for it being better than 2012 is well and truly dissipated.

Not that it's been a COMPLETELY terrible year thus far, but it's certainly the one with the most personal tragedy.

January: Father succumbs to cancer.
February:So depressed and out-of-it from January that I hire an almost completely useless part-timer.
March: Thankfully, not much happened.
April: Got really sick, likely owing to stress and working insane hours in attempting to get caught up.
May: Still sick, starting to realize just how useless part-timer truly is.
June: Feeling better, almost get completely caught up. Let part-timer go.
July: A series of equipment breakdowns and getting sick again just about puts me where I was in February, except for the hiring of the useless part-timer.
August: (1st week) Mother shows all the signs of having a stroke. False alarm, but event indicates that her Alzheimer's is progressively getting worse.
            (3rd week) Following a series of non-life-threatening health problems, my wife's mother, who lived with us, passes away suddenly in her sleep.

As I'm typing this, she has been gone for 12 days. It's only really been sinking in for the past three. Since she had been here in the house, the fact of her absence is rather continuous. Over the next few weeks, we will be facing the task of going through and throwing away/donating/disposing of her personal belongings, which includes a full bedroom set of furniture. I think that will be the hardest part for my wife. She and her were rather close, and her mom had been living with us for the past ten years. She's holding up, but I don't think she's really given in and allowed herself to feel the grief yet. I know from personal experience that you can't let yourself feel it in its entirety all at once, otherwise it will overwhelm.

I figure we'll start to get back to normal around about November. With any amount of luck, 2013 will at least stop dropping these little f-bombs on us.

Oh, right. My computer has this little feature that lets me travel back in time to save documents on the internet. It's called the "history" tab. So here's what I posted:

Another Deviant posted some little something today that stated "I just want someone to say I'm perfect." My knee-jerk reaction, one that I wisely refrained from posting in the comments section, was "oh, honey, no you don't." There's a couple of reasons why.

1)  It's a lie. That person really doesn't believe you're perfect. Not, at least, without qualification. You may be perfect for that person (relationship-wise), or perfect for whatever other reasons he/she needs you to be perfect, but perfect in its purest, most basic form means that you've no further room for improvement. You are the pinnacle of whatever it is you are. That, my friends, is not only difficult to acheive, the basic premise of it to begin with is fluid and ever-changing. If they don't believe you're perfect, but are saying so anyway, then...

2) It's also likely a con. That individual is waxing poetic the rapturous notion of your flawless persona so that you'll be so swept up by the hype that you'll possibly overlook what a train wreck of a personality he/she has. Surprisingly, it works more often than one would think. We all would like a cheerleader, and one that's essentially canonizing you to the masses would be a hard thing to turn away. Whenever one hears such platitudes, however, it might be a good idea to try and get a better understanding of the source.

3) It stunts you as a person. Let's face it, we all put a certain amount of effort into making ourselves better people. At least, I certainly hope so. If someone's saying you've reached your goal already, then what's the point of continuing? Mission accomplished, man. A good example of this is Hollywood. You can pretty much tell which actors believe their own press releases about their ability via the plateau their performances have hit. The point is, we can ALWAYS do better. We can always BE better.

Lastly, just for the sake of argument, let's proceed with the notion that a) said person is telling the truth, and b) the person being told believes it. What if the so-called perfect person finds their booster to be an insufferable prick? Or worse, just simply, tragically mediocre. There's a reason the phrase "out of one's league" is so cliche. It's 'cause it's true. We've all seen the movies where the guy/girl from the wrong side of the tracks wins the heart of the uptown hero. Yeah, that's fiction. Not to say that it never happens, but the frequency of occurrence is slightly higher than Mt. Vesuvius' eruptions. The truth is, we seek out people with whom we're more or less on equal footing. The swing of advantage, if one may call it that, isn't that great one way or the other. We may get attracted to the unbelievably amazing people, but we're more comfortable around (and hence stay married to) people in our own weight class.

I'm likely overthinking this whole thing. This person here on DA may really only be looking for a heartfelt compliment. That said, DA is probably not the best place on Earth to search for such things.

I just spent the better part of an hour writing a new journal entry. I hit "submit journal," which apparently is some foreign phrase meaning "disperse entry amid the aetheric plane," for it's gone. Not even in my drafts. There's an hour I'm not getting back.

Which, upon reflection, is rather like Facebook.

...when you're busy making other plans.

Yeah, so I've not posted anything in several months. What can I say, but I've been busy?

So yes, I'll post new stuff if/when they happen. I'm still around.