Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up...

i guess i've posted a bit that may need some explanation or at least some background...but not too much. i mean, why bore you all? but since mostly no one is reading this...

no matter. i will keep the back story mostly brief and vague.

i'm your basic immigrant dumbass who grew up here in the US of A after immigrating here after my family did (a story for later i suppose?). unlike my siblings, i grew up here minus my first 3 months of existence. i grew up in suburbia with a mix of friends from different ethnicity's in the 70's and 80's. to be honest, not until i was an adult did i find out i grew up in one of the most racist cities in the United States (thank you, Brian Copeland!). is that good or bad? i don't know. i do know i had a good childhood. i do know that most all of my long term friendships were developed then. basically, the 70's and 80s were good to me. maybe too good. maybe they didn't prepare me for my later years.

fast forward to the 90's and the 00's. not so bueno. not to say that good things didn't happen? just a lot of things i may have preferred to either not happen or have happened differently...and my responses to some of those events? let's just say that if i could build a time machine...

i had to take some time off working (while in school) to help care for my mother when my father lost his sight due to a diabetic episode. i decided to take a leave of absence from school to take care of my father who was now terminally ill...as well as my mother. i was kicked out of school during this time for completing the wrong forms for that time off. after the passing of my father, i put life on semi-hold to help care for my chronically ill mother... for the next 6 plus years.  she passed 5 months before my wedding...

fast forward 7 years...
my wife of nearly 7 years, (we were together 13 years overall) passed away from an accidental drowning 4 months after the birth of our daughter...on New Year's Day '05. yeah, those 2 decades were not happy ones. did i mention that i suffered through about a year of depression before i figured out what i was feeling was depression? no? eh, in the grand scheme it's prolly not that big of a deal.

through all these events, i've had to make choices regarding how to deal with each one and keep moving and growing from them. or not moving or growing from them depending on how you look at it. i'm not sure i regret all of my choices but i do know i regret quite a few. ok, more than a few. ok, alot. doesn't mean that i didn't learn from each good or bad decision. just means that i wish i may have learned those lessons in different less painful ways? perhaps also not learning some lessons more than once.

you can't control what happens to you in life, but you can control how you respond to those events. moving forward in life. i've decided that i really need to look harder at exactly that...how i respond to life's hairpin turns. how i make choices...and the choices i make. it's taken me 5 years now since my wife's passing for me to really decide that i need to more intentional about moving and growing forward....which is partly why i decided to start this blog i guess. i just needed to do something different and i needed an outlet.

so...there you have it. not short or vague as i promised...but at least it's there for all or none to see.

now back to our regularly scheduled programming...