9:05 AM: This town

I'm having a heck of a morning. I guess I fell out of my dreaming around 6 or so AM and wiped a crusty out of my eye carelessly because I could feel it get lodged in there, and my eye has been watering ever since. I feel like you could probably use that as a metaphor for life right now, just a major minor inconvenience and frustration.

Like, where to begin? I've been meaning to write for a while and so much has happened these past few weeks, and yet not much overall.

I've been in the office a few times the last few weeks. Last week was the big Town Hall meeting everyone came in for. I had a lot o feelings about that, you know... existential ones. What am I doing, where do I belong, who am I, etc, etc... the usual doubts about myself within a large group of people. It was nice to see some of them though, to talk through issues work and kvetch with people in person. But it also brought home how sensitive I am, still bitter about certain things and seeing the people at the root of those feelings gadding about like it's nothing. And I mean, I concede that it's a "me" problem -- grown-ups don't sulk the way I do, I think, and maybe the fact that I'm feeling these feelings is a sign that I wouldn't have handled the pressure well. I'm just in this weird ambiguous space of "I know I didn't deserve the job, but it wasn't for the reasons you said."

This week would have been better for that as fewer people were in the office, but I was there to get my new laptop set up and it was a shitshow. They hadn't set up pretty much anything I needed to do my job. It took all day to rectify and I was miffed because I kind of wanted to just grab my computer and get out and go home. As it is, now that everything's set up I still feel like I've lost some things. The screen looks different. The keyboard is different -- the cmd and fn keys are swapped so I keep pushing the wrong button to do things. Excel no longer opens with Bex analyzer by default, which I had gotten very accustomed to even though it is not standard. And for what? I'm not even sure we managed to get me the program I was supposed to have newly installed on this in the first place, that would let me participate in planning. I feel like I had a really good setup and I've lost it. What a cryin' shame.

I've started making a crack at one of my big boy projects. How this came about is, I've got some available mental real estate for writing after finishing with a certain project, and I think my ennui about work kind of nudged me in this direction. My joke is that if I put in one hour of work every time I am disgruntled about work/my career direction, I can have a draft by end of summer. I don't mean to make it sound so bad -- I've got a good job, I just feel like I'm spinning my wheels a bit and too nervous to change lanes. I often say if I am going to change lanes it would be for writing, but that doesn't offer any stability to speak of, so how can I justify that? Not when...

Well, I wasn't sure I was going to get to this, but let's hash it out. The baby thing.

Mel and I have been trying to have kids for a while now and back in December we suffered a really bad setback in that area. I won't write about it here, but it was hard. It basically meant that if we wanted kids -- and we do -- we would have to use a surrogate. But that's a lot of time and money and logistics compared to doing it yourself. It's frustrating and upsetting but it's the way it's got to be. This has sort of dominated out life now... in some way or other for the last two years but even moreso since January when we've been on this path. I haven't spoken about it because it creates expectations and curiosity and I just wanted to keep all of that under control and I didn't want to lose control by addressing it on this blog (even though, like, I'm the only one who reads this.) It's a... thing. 

Surrogacy, man. There's a lot involved here and while I was hoping we could link up with an agency and go from there, for one reason or another it has been a few dead ends. Some people are mentally tough enough to bear it and compartmentalize it, but it's really just become the undercurrent of our life together because it's all Mel can think about. It's the undertone of every day that is making life tense in our happy little home. We have happiness together but there's still this ongoing wellspring of disappointment and frustration discoloring everything we do and have. We don't fight, of course, but the mood gets tense. Because me -- and this is surely my failing as a person -- I have a hard time shouldering all of this. I look for those moments of retreat when I can just put it out of my mind, but I never know when Mel is going to turn to me and say "About this..." and it just... I dunno, it gets me. Does that sound immature the way I put it?

A while back, we were in this fertility group and I went to a men's meeting and we discussed how we handle the issues, and strategies like scheduling a time to talk about it with our partners, and I admitted that my partner's mind doesn't work like that. If she wants to talk about it at dinner or in the moments before bed, then that's what we're going to talk about, and my only "scheduling" is times like this -- a moment away -- when I know I have it to myself. It's Friday morning, unplug day, and I've got all of next week off, by the way.

And then I think constantly about what it's going to be like when we do have a baby, and how are we going to cope, and will we be good and all that, and it's very daunting -- and here I am usually the one preaching to take one step at a time when the reality is, I'm spinning further, faster, harder.

Anyway. We had a meeting earlier this week that seemed promising but Mel came out of it with a bad taste in her mouth, which spread the bad taste to my mouth because after all I feel her feelings as much as possible -- that's important to me. But it would have been so cool if we had found a group already.

And then there's the resentment because it feels like everyone's out there having kids like it's no big deal. This was part of what was so hard at the office. "Oh, your baby this, your pregnancy that" da-da, da-da, da-da, and I had to just feel that punch in my gut and walk away. It's a huge part of the reason I basically don't do Instagram, although honestly aside from certain periods in the pandemic I wasn't ever that into it anyway.

Other than that we have at least been busy little bees, which I think has the function of keeping our mind in the here and now. We put a lot of work into cleaning out the basement (although you wouldn't know it to look) in preparation for the upcoming garage sale where I hope to offload a lot of my old comics and assorted other junk. Someday we hope to get the basement into shape for general usage, but who knows when we will ever have money or time for that.

We've seen Mel's fam a few times lately, most recently for Mel's dad's birthday, and then we saw my whole family at Mom's for Brandon and Kris' 40th. I gave Kris a few boxes of comics he'd asked for. It was overwhelming seeing everyone in one place. I didn't give a lot of time to the extended relations other than Kris and I felt kinda bad about that, although I did spend some time talking to Aaron who is finally reaching maturity. We're trying to spend a lot of time with mom given this whole situation with Ross. It was also good to catch up with Eric after missing him the last time at Dad's. We've got Dad's again this weekend.

I dunno. It's hard to find time for "us," for fun and levity and all that good stuff. Like I said, the mood around here isn't always great, even though we love each other and like our lives. It's the stress and anxiety about what we don't have, rather than dissatisfaction with what we do. What we have here is two people who love each other very much (goopily so) but who are just a little sad about some of the stuff they've had to go through. Okay, more than a little sad.

Life, life, life. All this and trying to figure out what to have for dinner every day, too! And lunch! And trying to save money! And...

Yeah.

Well, keep on rockin'

-Scotto