Stir crazy angst

posted by Jeff | Thursday, April 26, 2012, 11:51 PM | comments: 0

I have been completely bouncing off of the walls lately. With this bouncing comes a lot of angst that is directed toward a number of different circumstances. Overall, I feel like I'm kind of whining. Nobody likes people like that.

The stir crazy part is pretty easy to explain. I work from home and we haven't had a vacation since Christmas. Furthermore, that was not exactly restful because of the car accident. I don't even remember the last time I went four months without, at the very least, taking a nice long four-day weekend. The working at home part surprisingly doesn't make this easier, it makes it worse.

The angst comes from a lot of different places, not the least of which is also the home I work and live in. While it's a comfortable place that we enjoy, it's also one that is the embodiment of many of our troubles the last few years. In fact, we wouldn't even be here if we sold it two years ago. So even if I like it, it feels a bit like a prison, and now I even work in it! It's a completely bizarre situation.

And that leads to some of the issues around living in Cleveland. I'm always reminded of the scene in the movie Orange County where Kevin Kline tells Colin Hanks that the best writers all exhibited an intense love-hate relationship with the place they were from. Unlike the Hanks character, however, I will not likely embrace the place I used to live. I hate it here. I expend a lot of energy hating it. OK, maybe hate is too strong a word. It's probably less about hating it and more about liking Seattle better. I felt like I belonged there, while I feel like I'm just done with Cleveland.

That causes me to second guess my decisions on a daily basis. I strongly felt that moving back was mastering my destiny, particularly the financial part. Even with the dollar crisis of the car accident and a lot of money spent on home improvement, the planned outcome has, so far, more than come to fruition. But does all of that monetary rightness compensate for living in a backward, homo-hating, income taxing, government failing state make up for it?

Fortunately, things are balancing out a little without any particular action on my part. The first thing is that we've got travel plans. Some plans are more specific than others, but we have the flexibility to drive so many places that we just couldn't go before. That will certainly ease the location issues, for the time being. I even had some scenarios recently crop up where I could see myself being here a lot longer term, and that's quite unexpected. And of course, I'm not a politician, so I reserve the right to change my opinions or feelings at any time.

When I "got home" from work today, Simon was so happy to see me, and my beautiful wife hugged me, and it all felt like the world was right. I felt anti-entitled to be bitching about anything. I've got it good in a lot of ways, and I'm working on the stuff I'm less than happy with. I just need a few more weeks and I'll be able to relax a little. And heck, with Cedar Point opening soon, I can have the kind of summer fun that has been sorely absent in my life.


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