2010 - Simple Resolutions for A Simple Year

2010 started very simply and gracefully for me – a long weekend in the company of friends, but in person and virtually. I ended the old year and started the new in the company of my dearest T.R. and I cannot think of any other way I would have liked for it to end and begin.

I am keeping my New Year’s Resolutions simple this year, complete with a simple acronym to remind me of them – WALK Simply.

-Write
-Act
-Learn
-Keep Healthy

-Simply get the full worth of each day.

I am consciously making the choice this year to keep things simple.

Daily Life: A Significant Day

Today is a significant day in my healing path. Last week when I went to the foot doctor he removed the stitches and cleaned the remaining dead skin and debris from around the wound site. It looks...good.

The surgery site is close up, the skin is mostly a soft pink with scar tissue (a nice jagged Y shaped scar). The infection has been cleared out. I kept the site covered and bandaged over the weekend to insure the small suture holes had a chance to heal shut - and today - today I can set aside the post-op boot, unbandage the foot, and put on a sock and shoe - an ordinary sock and shoe! In short, the healing process is well underway.

I will still need to be careful as I walk and still need to take it easy, but I can begin the process of returning to normal mobility. I have an appointment on Wednesday (the 23rd) with the orthotic specialist who is going to take the measures and mold of the foot for the orthotic device that will go into the boot and take the place of the now absent toe.

I think I am going to go out today and walk around (just a little bit) for lunch, carrying my cane and wearing my shoes!

Daily Life: A House Made of Glass

It was the first day in a long time that I have participated over at One Minute Writer. Here was my entry:

I would build a house made of glass, with walls of colored frost, a thousand shades, a thousand lights, a thousand imperfect places where I could dwell.

Daily Life: Slowly Healing

Well, I am slowly moving through the healing process here. The infection is cleared (the last sets of cultures have come back clean and the infectious disease specialist is going to discontinue to antibiotics at the end of this cycle, the middle of next week) and the surgery site is healing nicely. It is still partially stitched, but I have a doctor's appointment with the foot doctor later this afternoon and I suspect more, if not all, of the remaining stitches are going to come out.

I've been passing quiet and reflective days. Days spent reading, listening to music, watching television and movies, thinking, and doing incidental cleaning, sorting through the flotsam and jetsam that accumulates in boxes stored in closets. I am periodically astounded by the things I seem to hold onto because I think they might have some future value. I had opened one box and it was full of old computer parts and cords and accessories. I started to sort them and it dawned on me - they had been in the box for two years at least and I had not had any need for them. They made the short and glorious trip to the dumpster.

Because what I went through (the amputation of the toe) was a pretty significant event, several people have asked me what the lesson was. I haven't really thought to draw any great lesson out of it yet - in part because it was only five plus weeks ago and it still needs perspective to be interpreted and understood. There may very well be some significant life lesson buried in there, so penetrating insight waiting to be revealed, but I haven't rooted around for it yet.

The days pass quietly and gently and that is the way healing days should.

Daily Life: Thirty Two Degrees

Last night I went to sleep early - about 9:00 PM. I slept a solid eight hours and woke up at 5:00 AM. That is the disadvantage of going to sleep too early!

I had a busy day yesterday - I had an appointment with the infection specialist (the latest round of cultures came back clear) and then a holiday luncheon with my team from work at By The Bucket on Steven's Creek.

The luncheon was excellent. It was probably the busiest external day I've had in the last month and I am sure it contributed to my falling asleep early last night (and sleeping so well).

This morning was COLD for San Jose - it was below freezing when I woke up, which is very rare for this part of the country.

Today's plan is simple - do next to nothing and heal. (It is the general plan that I have been on for the last month and will be on for the next month or two. In general, I am healing well and recovering nicely from the surgery.)

Poetry: Absolution

She came seeking absolution
For all the crimes she never did
She came seeking restitution
For all the times she ran and hid

She sees the twilight drawing closer
She sees the setting of the sun
She feels the years closing on her
And all she wants to do is run

She made her share of simple choices
Most of which she now regrets
She wants one last chance at glory
Walking on the wire without a net

She longs to hear the bells at midnight
As she dances to the Spanish bands
Watching her lovers body swaying
Waiting to feel him trembling in her hand

On the old brass bed she moves with abandon
Everything she was she left behind
She is lost somewhere inside her passion
Inside the fires of her mind

There are seven stars shining
In the darkness of the night
And the two lives that she lives
Meet in the palaces of light

I have no memory of writing this poem. I was looking for a clipboard today to fill out some insurance related forms and the poem was on the clipboard. It is clearly my handwriting.

Daily Life: Question Number Nine

To what degree have you actually controlled the course your life has taken?

I find this question rather interesting in light of the long shadow cast by the last month’s events. But, let me tackle it anyway. I would say a very high degree. Somewhere in my teens I recognized the power of choice. Oh, I didn’t fully recognize it – and recognizing it is definitely not the same thing as exercising it, but somewhere at a young age I realized that I had that power. The freedom to choose, the freedom act – good old Free Will. None of this means that things always turned out the way I expected them to. None of this means that I was in any way freed from the constraints of incidents and accidents. It only means that I made choices – and those choices had results on the large scale outcomes of my life to this point.

Outside of the Ninth Question – I am on a healing path right now. I am out of work and currently disabled, slowly healing. The doctors continue to give me a good prognosis for a full recovery. The infection is gone. The x-ray’s look good. The wound itself is healing. This last week the doctor removed about half the stitches. If you visualize the wound as a Y, the only place that remains stitched is the juncture of the Y. I am now allowed to ease weight back onto the foot which is a tremendous relief. Just the ability to set the foot down and balance on it makes all the difference.

Yesterday, I had breakfast with Tony and Tyrone at the Hickory Pit, then later in the day went to see “The Road” over at Pruneyard Camera Cinema with Tony. (The movie was very close in tone and tempo to the book and was “excellent if bleak”.) Today I took the longest walk yet on the foot – I limped about a hundred feet to the mail box and back, moving slowly, moving cautiously. I am currently sitting, watching the end of Kill Bill Volume II, anticipating a phone call with my beloved T.R. shortly. When that wraps up, I am looking forward to watching the first episode of “Alice” on the SyFy channel. In short, another night, slowly healing.

Daily Life: Surgery and The Greatest Toe

Well, it has been a while since I have written and truthfully it has been a short and quickly brutal couple of weeks. I am currently laying in the hospital, flat on my back, post surgery.

To make a long story short let me summarize quickly. A persistent infection in the foot lingered for a couple of weeks. After a trip to the ER due to an allergic reaction to Keflex I scheduled an appointment at a wound clinic. That was last Wednesday. I was admitted to the hospital, placed on an around the clock IV of antibiotics, examined, x-rayed and bone-scanned.

The testing revealed the infection was in the bone of the right big toe. Four days of antibiotics and Monday evening into surgery for the amputation of the toe and a portion of the metatarsal bone. The surgery went well. I am back in the hospital room and in good spirits, with a very good prognosis for recovery according to the doctors.

I am going to be laid up for a period of time (six weeks is a good ball park according to the doctor) while the foot heals. Right now I am completely off the foot (no weight at all until the healing has progressed). They will start PT and crutch training in a few days.

It's been a roller coaster ride but the worst of it is behind me (the rampant infection and the surgery). From here on out it is rest and heal, with naps.

On an amusing note, I was surprised to learn that the actual name of the big toe is "the great toe". I knew it was big - I just never realized it was great! My humor and sense of life are intact and I'll keep both as I move down the healing path.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Question Number Eight

Today was a quiet day at the office. I struggled to get out of second gear all day and I don’t think I ever made it. Fortunately it was a day that I could handle in second gear, so it was all good. I spent most of the day doing some application testing, corporate training, and working my way through my backlogged email. T.R. is on travel, so we had a great call about mid-day and then she was back to work. I am looking forward to talking to her tonight. I had dinner with Tony at Holder’s and then came home, where I am catching up on my television (watching Bones).

Let me drop straight into Question Number Eight:

If the average human life was 40 years how would you live your life differently?

Well, first off, being forty nine I would be dead, so the question becomes a moot point. I’ve never been much of a person to dwell on the many different choices that I could have made through my life. We then layer on top of that my faith in an immortal soul. The end result is I wouldn’t have done anything differently. We have all of eternity to do everything. We’ve done many things before. We will do many things to come. Then, if the quantum theory of multiple universes is correct, we ARE doing everything else, now, simultaneously, somewhere in the wilderness of space and time. That is kind of a cool thought.

I don’t have anything planned for the weekend. I have things that I would like to do – I am feeling a desire to head over to the coast and get lunch or perhaps wander for a while, maybe hit a museum somewhere. There are a lot of little things that I would like to do around the apartment to prepare for the fall, so I may tackle some of them. I am looking forward to a quiet and gentle fall, with ample time to spend reading and writing and reflecting. We will see if I can make that particular wish come true.

Oh, that reminds me – let me tell you about a very vivid dream I had last night. I dreamt that I was a District Attorney and that I had been responsible for a highlight profile prosecution of three sisters who had committed a particularly high profile murder. It was a tough prosecution but I was successful. One of the attorneys who worked for me came upon some potentially exculpatory evidence and turned it over to me. A short while later, another of the attorney’s went on an anti-religious rant, harassing various people in the office for their religious affiliations.

I attempted to iscipline the attorney and it became very confrontational, so I started the process of suspension and termination. Then, the first attorney joined with the second attorney and they attempted to blackmail me into dropping the disciplinary action because the first attorney believed I had buried the evidence earlier. They thought they had me. But, as the investigation began to unfold the learned that immediately after the exculpatory evidence was given to me, I had contacted the Office of Professional Responsibility and turned the evidence over to an independent investigator. I swiftly termed both lawyers who had engaged in misconduct and attempted to blackmail me. The independent investigation into the exculpatory evidence turned up a witness – a witness who, rather than providing evidence to free the three sisters – provided the evidence that bolstered my original case.

I awoke glad that I was an ethical District Attorney. It was a strange dream, I am not sure I have ever had a lawyer dream before. I am sure the dream had its roots in a conversation TR and I had about honesty as well as recent Mercury News stories about investigations into the conduct of the local D.A.’s office. It all layered together and moved through my subconscious. It was a very cool and very vivid dream.

Question Number Seven

This week has pretty much flown by. Work is what I like to refer to as incidentally busy. As a corporation we’re starting the run toward the end of the year, which means there are a lot of incidental little things that need to be taken care of, not the least of which is the performance review cycle. As a manager, in addition to my own self-evaluation I have to write evaluations for all my employees. That is often a challenge and the company’s performance review mechanism is something I struggle with. I don’t like it. I don’t think there is enough variance in it to effectively and formally review the performance of employees. It is an argument that I will never win of course, but it is one that I have had on many occasions. That segues neatly into the question of the day.

Are you doing what you believe in or are you settling for what you are doing?

I often refer to the last fourteen years of my professional life as my accidental career. I was working as a contractor while in graduate school with the intention of pursuing a PhD in Criminology and further intentions of teaching – then I was assigned to The Evil Corporation on a short term contract and fourteen years later, here I am, deep in the middle of an accidental career, having temporarily set aside aspirations to higher education.

So, to a degree, there was a settling – however, in my case, it was a settling into something that I love to do (solve problems, resolve difficult issues, manage personal, do the impossible, the usual). I love what I do and that is not something I have been able to say in other jobs and careers I’ve had. Even my bad days are often good – and for me the bad days always involve people and clashing against the bureaucratic tendency to be, well, bureaucratic. Don’t get me wrong – I believe in rules, I understand the purpose of defined and disciplined process – as long as they serve an actual purpose. So, for me at least, the answer to the question is I am doing what I believe in, almost entirely by accident.