Tearing At The Seams
I'm sitting here sipping coffee, keeping an ear on the lecture going on right now. We're on a pretty important topic: diabetes and, unlike some, the professor doing the lecture is showing himself to be a very dynamic and interesting lecture. For once, my lack of sleep last night was not so much due to my habitual messing around but because I was upset. There are things I need to get off my chest.
I've said it before, by most measures a person could use things are good. Yet I just can't seem to shake off this dark cloud that seems to follow me. I think keeping up the lifestyle of keeping myself distracted on trivial things, namely messing around on the internet, has not helped matters. Its a way of living that is all well and good if you want to keep yourself from thinking too much about life and avoiding dealing with problems, but sooner or later its going to cause trouble, particularly if you're trying to juggle things like school along with it. I'm looking at the things I've done and I'm forced to ask the question: is this really how I want to live? Here I am, 30 years old, and I can't say that I'm making the kind of difference I want to. I'd feel better if certain things such as my writing output were doing well, but that has all but ground to a halt. I made a resolution to try and write at least something every day and so far the results are mixed.
Into this chaotic mix, enter the latest news. After almost 15 years, the relatively stable (no pun intended) arrangement that we had with the horses is finally crumbling. I won't go into details, but the biggest problem is the return of this trainer Farrah who is, by far, the most onerous individual we've been forced to contend with during our time. A few summers ago sh had come to the barn and Mom took an instant dislike of her. I tried, as usual, to maintain the diplomatic approach and at least give her a chance, but I quickly saw Mom's view. She monopolized the arena throughout the entire day, filling it with junk and having several horses at liberty and then inviting us to "come in and play" when its not necessarily the safest to add another horse to that mix. And when it comes to the horses, I play alone. This is my time to relax and unwind from the stresses and trials of the day. Its not a thing that I do well in a crowd. Another thing that is irksome to us and was the first thing that turned both Mom and I off to her is this artificial "nicey-nice" attitude that she has. Its more of a way of speaking, again that whole come in and play when the situation is such that any rational person would think about taking them up, and that's the whole point of the thing. The tearing point for me was one time when I'd left a piece of our equipment in the arena as she was bringing her horse out and she led it over it. Thankfully it didn't step on it, but I'm convinced it was a deliberate attempt to run over it.
The return of this trainer is bad enough in itself, but she's bringing reinforcements. The idea is, the way I understand it, is to turn the barn into a clinic site for the Pat Parelli training method that she's a part of. Not good. There is an unfortunate truth to the horse world and that is there's a lot of scum floating around in it. This is going to be an unwanted influx of people. I'll admit that there's a small part of me that would like to meet some more people (I'm thinking some nice pretty 20 something, but that's a whole other topic), but I know well and good that problems are bound to arise when there's a line of people waiting for the arena. It wasn't as much of an issue when we first arrived: we would just saddle up Scotch and I'd just crawl on and ride. I could work around most things in the arena and Scotch was a good, steady riding horse. Stormy, its more complicated. Not to mention I had hoped to get myself back into riding slowly and steadily once I get my weight down and this is going to pose an unneeded complication on that. Out of all of the prospective folks out there, some of them have to be on a full work schedule like me.
I'm returning to finish things up on the 20th and things have improved. A weekend to rest and recover helped considerably. I have realized that so many of the things that are wrong are the result of estrangement from the things provided such a base of support: home and family, riding every day, my writing, and most importantly my faith in God. I have looked on the last decade as a period of general decline in my life, with some obvious exceptions. Most of it is due to my own actions. I think the goal for the next one is to reverse these losses. As my life as a student is just over a year short of conclusion, I feel fairly confident that this can happen.
There are some good things to report. In our first lab on Monday, I tested my own blood glucose. I have eluded to my fear of needles on many occasions, in our very first dispensing class being told we were going to do that took me from half asleep to bolt upright. I was so nervous that, during the time when we were working with the meters, I was avoiding it at all costs. While folks were doing their actually run with the proctor, I finally got up the nerve to try it. It really wasn't painful at first anyway, it started hurting about a minute later, but that was more tolerable. So this was a major hurdle overcome.
As far as technology goes, this has been an interesting period. My television set lost its picture for awhile. I was initially concerned it had finally given up its ghost, however I left it on for awhile and the picture returned. It is somewhat unreliable and sometimes the picture is somewhat tinged with another color (if it survives two more months, the green will work for St. Patty's day), but its better than nothing. Also, my keyboard had a brief failure in a lot of the keys. It looked like it was just dust, quickly corrected by the tech support people with a quick blast of compressed air after opening the thing up. Hopefully there will not be many more such issues.