RTT: My Random Past

Here's some stuff I found in my Franklin Planner from 1996. To provide some content (which, of course, should be unnecessary for a bunch of random sh*t - but I'm going to do it anyway):

• The Middle-Aged Woman and I had been married for ten years.


• The Girl was 6 years old; The Boy, 4 - he started pre-school on January 9


• I had worked for the Internal Revenue Service for nearly 13 years - and didn't know that I would be changing jobs before the end of the year.

That's enough d*mn context...

Jan. 4:

MAW put The Boy is his room for misbehaving. Entering his room to serve penance, he yelled out, trying to summon venom in his high-pitched four-year-old voice, the worst epithet he could muster -

"YA BIG BUTT!!"

and slammed the bedroom door. [We still laugh regularly about that incident.]

Jan. 11:

I figure there are two kinds of talkative people: the kind where a quieter person thinks "I wish I had said that" - and the kind where a quieter person thinks "I wish he'd SHUT UP!"

You want to be the former.

March 10:

If something is "good" only because it is new, then it will likely only be good while it is new.

March 26:

If a person is not willing to do something, then it doesn't much matter whether they are able to do that thing. You must be willing to act.

May 9:

A candidate for "The Biggest Lie You Can Tell Yourself"- Nothing I do will make a difference, will make things better.

June 5: (Editor's note - I titled this one, "Useless Thought")

All of the reasons a woman can give for not having sex boil down to the same reason - she didn't want to.

July 7:

Today, The Boy road his bike without training wheels for the first time. It finally shamed The Girl into trying.

August 13:

While donating blood today, the volunteers told me that my blood is so "clean", it can be given to infants during surgery.

Sept. 6: (Editor's note - I titled this one, "A Warning")

You don't have to "try to be" what you ARE.

[For example: "I wasn't trying to be [insert quality here]." Mean, silly, good ]

What you ARE always becomes APPARENT.

Oct. 29: Eleven days after his fifth birthday, The Boy ran into the corner of a half-wall in the hallway of our house. Before he could become aware of the damage done to himself, I got a towel on The Boy's head to hide, if not stop, the bleeding. I sternly instructed The Girl to not give any impression to The Boy how badly he might be hurt* and we were off to the Emergency Room. The Boy ended up needing 4 stitches to close up the wound in his scalp. When he hair is cut short, you can still see the scar. Both The Girl and The Boy acquitted themselves admirably in this episode.

Nov. 29: My last day working for the Internal Revenue Service.

Dec. 2: My first day working for Perot Systems (my current employer)

Dec. 22:

"Daddy, why are you naked?" - a question posed by the The Girl at 7:55 am on Sunday morning.
(Editor's note: I wish I could provide some context here - but I got nothing. Maybe she walked in on the MAW and me...)

PS: And since we're talking about nudity - and I've previously mentioned my statistical tracking of sexual activity in my Franklin Planner during certain periods of my marriage - I noticed a DRAMATIC increase in activity around the time of my career change. Hey - maybe I've been going about this all WRONG...

Hope you found this "Blast from the Past" interesting.

Take care.