So I was messing with my small business's contact remailer form today on its website. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it's the page where you fil out your name, e-mail address and other information and send it to a company in hopes of receiving a response. Well, for shits and giggles, I sent this message in Engrish :



I wasn't paying too much attention when I wrote this, but after seeing it about a dozen times (I kept resending it with code attached to make sure the remailer was sniffing it out and canceling the mailsend portion of the code properly) I began to dwell on it.

As if nobody here at SoulCast has noticed, my wife hasn't been on her blog for months. She is miserable with her morning-noon-and-night sickness and has lost about 40lbs over her pregnancy. Compound this with being without a kitchen (and now laundry facilities) due to remodeling, but then tack on how she has all but brought these renovations to a hault with her constant "being sick"-ness, the fact that I've been either dry as a bone or over my head in work (more the latter than the former), the fact that all of the house chores (guess who's going to the laundry mat tomorrow? Oh, but wasn't I suppose to work on the house with my father-in-law??) have fallen on me, all of the vehicle maintenance has fallen on me, all of the yard work (leaves? hello?) has fallen on me, and top it with a cherry that the only person who is going to alleviate all of this mess (i.e. fix everything) is back to... You guessed it... ME!

So why am I bitching about this? Because the scales aren't scales anymore. There is no scale. There is no balance, and after just celebrating our first wedding anniversary over this past weekend I realize that there were never any scales and I bought into this facade fair and square. Am I giving up on my marriage? No. Am I giving up on my wife? No. Am I giving up? It certainly seems like the easier route, doesn't it?

In the midst of all of this, there are these little glimmers of 'hope.'

My business is growing and becoming unstable in a good way, and if I can get the infrastructure together in time -- much like putting a basement under a slab house, it's very difficult, but it can be done -- it could easily go super-nova by the first of next year. It's going to have to balloon, otherwise I'm simply going to retire two weeks after the baby gets here and be done with it all. I mean, I begrudge the whole idea of becoming a stay-at-home dad. Talk about epic fail. Perhaps I can walk around in a dress and carry a purse or something... Shave my legs... My balls... My ass... Brrr.

My ability to sell appears to be sprouting legs. I've always been a soft-sell kind of sales guy, basically presenting my services in a "take it or leave it" sort of way. Either you need my services or you don't. If you don't, nice to talk to you buddy, but I have to put food on my table. I had one of those meetings today. This one dip shit, after he basically decided in his head that he didn't need my services, wanted to sit around and bullshit with me in some rouse to sponge vital information out of me. Look, I've been doing this shit for two decades. I'm not going to give you a 20 minute cram session over a beer. What the fuck do I look like? Tank from The Matrix? Give me a fucking break, I've got shit to do, ass hat!

In the meantime, the wife is miserable and I am miserable. Seriously, I have not had but maybe ten collective minutes of joy in the past 21-22 weeks. I picked up our anniversary cake from the same outfit who made the actual cake -- whipped creme frosting, mmm -- and between the two of us we've had a sliver in four days. That's pathetic. It speaks volumes.

Something is broken, and for the life of me I don't understand the mechanism enough to fix it. I try love, I get rejected. I try space, I get dejected. I try stability, it becomes less stable. I try to be responsible and I wake up with a plate that gives me ten times the responsibility. I simply cannot win. I'll be lucky to make it to the 40th week. Even if I get there, I probably won't get much as far as kudos, celebration, pomp nor fanfare. Even though I am not alone, I certainly feel alone. I feel like I'm juggling flaming chainsaws belonging to everybody else, and if I stopped -- even for a second -- I'd realize that nobody really gave a shit that I took that burden over for them.

Perhaps Crazy Todd was right. Perhaps I just love that position of martyrdom. I think I've grown to the point where I realize that I'm not really doing it for them, though... And I'm not really doing it for me, either. I'm simply doing it. I hope that one of these days I can fix my Fun, because right now, it's broke.