Date Archives → May 2026

Hop aboard the struggle bus our rates are reasonable and our seats are clean hey what do you mean you don’t have exact change f*ck

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that I’d be better at handling loss than I am. Maybe to believe the mid-west adage that there’s nothing more curative than WORK WORK WORK to take your mind off things.

Whatever the case, I have been struggling. I feel like I’m doing a terrible job at school and that just messes with my head. I can’t stand being somebody who isn’t doing their best, and there is no doubt that my classes are being affected by what I’m going through.

I’ve missed more days of work these last few months than I have at any job ever, which means I’ve had substitute teachers, which means that all of my classes are behind in their coursework. It’s nothing insurmountable, and I don’t mean to say a single bad word against substitute teachers — they are vital and God bless every one of them — but the fact is that not as much work gets done when the class has a sub.

Lots of students, even the most studious students, tend to slack off. I don’t get upset at students for it — what am I going to do? Get mad at someone for not wanting to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?”

Plus, I often feel like a significant portion of my brain has melted. I am just … dumber than I used to be. My memory is bad. I have trouble focusing. Little things that I’d normally remember slip through the cracks. (Cue a panicked student yelling, “Did you grade my paper yet!?”)

Between this paragraph and the last paragraph I typed, I just spent about 10 minutes trying to get the cat to sit on the heated pad we got her. Unsuccessfully.

Sigh.

The solution here is obvious: Time.

Of course that’s the answer. I have to be gracious with myself and give myself time. All I do by beating myself up like this is giving myself a proverbial black eye. All I have to do is wait. Breathe. Exist. “This, too, shall pass.”

I hate it, though. Until it does pass, I hate every last minute of it.

It wasn’t a funeral technically we didn’t have a funeral it was an inurnment which I learned is different than an interment

Here are some words I did say at my father’s funeral:

…everything good that I am is thanks to you. I am living and pursuing happiness in a foreign land, a thing that I have always dreamed of doing and a thing in which I find exceptional value and strength. If I wouldn’t have had you, if I wouldn’t have had Mom, none of this would have been possible. If we are to count our blessings then this is the first and perhaps greatest of mine.

Yeah, it was a little sappy.

Neither of my brothers were particularly jazzed about the idea of saying something at Dad’s gravesite, so I had a little speech typed out and in my coat pocket. I won’t put all of it here on the blog, but the whole thing was about how ineffective words are at explaining loss.

The speech ended with me yelling, “Kakaw!” at all the nice folks at our small grave-side gathering. Sarah’s part was to reply by hollering, “Aye-aye-aye!” like a member of a mariachi band. (It made sense in context.)

Dad would’ve liked that.