Daily writing prompt

What could you do more of?

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What could I do more of? I feel like I am lacking in so many areas of life. Nothing so much as to be a problem, but many things where I just want to be doing better than I am.

• Helping/supporting/being there for my wife. I do some, but not nearly enough. Not even close.
• Helping/supporting/being there for my step kids. Again, I do what I can but they are so far away from us now it’s very difficult. Any time there is the slightest hiccup in their lives I just want to drop everything and go running and I just can’t do it when they are a couple of hundred miles away.
• Helping/supporting/being there for my extended family. This mostly includes my father, but also in a big way it includes my niece and my three nephews. I never feel like I am there for any of them. I chip in for my father when I can, but not nearly enough, and as for the four kids, am I the worst, most useless uncle on Earth? I think so. I am doing an abysmal job at being an uncle.
• Helping/supporting/being there for my staff at work. I think I am doing an okay job as a supervisor, but I could be doing so much more.

Those are the big ones. There are a slew of other areas where I could be doing more that fall under personal, mental well being kind of things. More music, more photography, more travel, more exploration, more community stuff. Those sorts of things. They are clearly secondary to family and work though.

So I guess my answers for today’s daily writing prompt are pretty much the same as most of my prompt answers. Family, work, personal things. I feel like a bit of a broken record, but they are the most important things in my life, you know?

Daily writing prompt

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

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The best advice I’ve ever received… I’m not sure. Does it count as advice if it was something you were 100% going to do anyway?

Uncle Johnny was my father’s brother and my godfather. While the godfather part is technically meaningless to an atheist, it still has meaning from a family perspective. He was an alcoholic who lived a very hard life before getting sober and straightening himself out. He was an inspiration, and very likely the reason I have never really touched alcohol. He was a type two diabetic in his later years and his health went down the crapper in a major way at the end. He died in a horrible yet thankfully quick fashion and I miss him a lot.

When I first started dating Jen back in 2007 his diabetes was out of control and it cost him his lower leg. He was in and out of the hospital and various rehab and half way houses as he needed more and more surgeries and more and more physical therapy to deal with his new reality. Jen used to go with me to visit him.

In the short time that Uncle Johnny knew Jen, he was really taken with her. He was a huge fan of hers, and of our relationship. Sadly he never met the kids. Bellana was six and Harry was four and Jen and the kids’ father had an arrangement that said new relationships should last for six months before the kids become involved. We were still under that six month mark when this particular conversation happened.

Johnny was in a bed in a rehab place. I think Jen was with me for this particular visit but she was out of the room for some reason. He asked about the kids and I told him I still had not been introduced to them but the big day was coming soon. The advice he gave me was simple and while it is clearly the best advice I can remember receiving, I was absolutely going to do it anyway so does it still count? I don’t know. I don’t recall the exact words but the gist of it was, you make sure you do right by those kids, Rob.

By the time he said that to me it was already becoming a primary life goal. Still, I hope I’ve made my uncle proud.

On a lighter note, there was another, earlier piece of sage advice that Uncle Johnny gave me. I was a teenager at the time. He told me, again paraphrasing because I don’t recall the exact words, put off shaving as long as you can because once you start you can never stop. I wanted to follow that advice, but I looked really awful with a spotty, patchy beard and I just had to shave off what little there was as soon as it became visible. Here we are almost 40 years later and I still look terrible with facial hair. He was right though. As soon as I started shaving it became a regularly scheduled pain in the ass.

Thanks for the advice, Uncle Johnny.

Daily writing prompt

What things give you energy?

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Another vague and kinda pointless daily prompt. Oh well. They can’t all be bangers.

The literal answer is food and water, right? Biochemistry and all that? When you feed your cells they produce energy and you get to keep running without issue for a few hours or so. I took a biology class in high school. I took a chemistry class in high school too. I never took a biochem class. What I’ve learned in that regard comes from either learning about my step son’s type one diabetes, or just listening to my step daughter talk about her job.

The figurative energy sources are more interesting, but also pretty obvious and straight forward. What gives me energy? Being with my wife. Being with my step kids. Being with my niece and nephews, though that doesn’t happen often because I am a terrible uncle and likely just a terrible person all around.

Being creative gives me energy. For me that means music, both making music and just listening to music, or playing with the cameras and photos as if I knew what I was doing. Sometimes a good movie or TV show can be a source of energy on some weird level. A good book can do the same.

Traveling can do it. Driving on a road trip, visiting a new place, exploring something or somewhere. What does not give me energy, quite the opposite, is spending time with crowds of new people. That just sucks the life right out of me. I think that is the textbook definition of an introvert. Maybe?

Okay, there are a few vague thoughts on this vague question. I guess it got the job done in that it did prompt me to write more than a few words worth of a post. Success.