Crawling under a rock and hopefully crawling back out

There is something that happens to some people when they lose their significant other, perhaps more for those who enjoyed many years together, or whose love was particularly fierce. When the one whom they considered their "soul mate" suddenly is no more, you can see the life go out of the survivor. Not immediately--although it does for some--but slowly, over time, you can watch them waste away. Pining, we call it. Some will self-medicate with alcohol or other drugs. Some simply withdraw into themselves. They become that cranky old person, or the even more frightening quiet one that merely stares right through you. We seen countless versions of it in movies. We hear that it happens, but what I never hear about it how it happens. I'd like to take a moment to explain.

Some of you may already know this. Some of you may actually be experiencing this without realizing that it's going on. To a few of you this might be an alien concept; in that case, let this be a cautionary tale for you to take to heart and bring to bear if and when the time ever comes when you need it.

When your beloved dies, your whole world is thrown upside down. Suddenly, a new perspective is thrown upon you unbidden. Your priorities change. What seemed important yesterday seems trivial today. Does it really matter if your socks match? Who really cares? And if they do, maybe they are the one with the problem and not you. That's how it starts. You see someone getting upset over the smallest thing, and you think to yourself, "You think you have problems?? My wife/husband/fiance/boyfriend/girlfriend/whoever just DIED!! What have you got to complain about? Someone accidentally bumped into you in the checkout line? Are you nuts? Lose someone you love and then come talk to me!" What happens is that the death (actually your grief over the death, but let's not split hairs) becomes the litmus test for every single social transaction we observe in life. Like I said, it can be a very slow process, but that is how it works. You hear about an argument, and you shake your head: if they only knew how unimportant that is. With the passage of time, more and more things are added to that list. Nothing can compare to the loss you feel. Until one day, you find out that everything else is trivial. All of it. It's all just noise and a waste of time. In the end, none of it matters.

And it applies to all aspects of life. Nothing is worth doing. Nothing is worth getting involved in. Nothing to get excited about. Nothing to care about. What's the point? This is when drinking and the drugs and the withdrawal kick in, or kick it up a notch. The less you have to engage the "real world" the better. Isolation and loneliness become your antidote to being alone and abandoned. (Hint: telling someone that whoever died "wouldn't want you to be like this" probably won't work because "whoever died" knows how much I loved them and they understand why I'm like this; you cannot expect a rational response where the deepest, rawest emotions are involved. If you don't know what to say, own it. Tell them you can't imagine their pain, and hug them if they'll have it. It will do much more for them.)

One of my favorite sayings used to be "Nothing is Trivial". I was a good, ready-made excuse for all the trivia I kept locked in my brain. Then, suddenly, that all changed. Everything became trivial. When someone close to you dies, your priorities are forced to change. You have to reevaluate everything that ever included that person and somehow figure out a way not to include them. In some cases the answer is a workaround, at least until a better way presents itself. Some things you have to relearn from the ground up, or learn for the first time if it was something the Other was primarily responsible for. And some things, you simply let go of--or stop doing because letting go is the one thing that's so hard. The trick is knowing which is which and when to stop. Reprioritizing is the natural response to your new world. You just need to remember that even though some things may be less important, it doesn't mean they are UNimportant. That's a huge difference.

I have traveled down this road, and the results are not pretty. The house is a mess, the yard is a wreck, I don't like going outside. I don't like going out in public. I would have loved to go to my 40th class reunion, but just...couldn't. It would have been wonderful to see everyone again. Thankfully--and this is why I have said it over and over again--I have you. You will never know--cannot possibly know--how important you have been to me during this period of grieving. I post on my blogs and my social media, and you respond with words of encouragement, and likes and loves and sad faces, when words are not enough or cannot be found. It all means something. Something wonderful for me. It means someone "out there" is listening and someone out there cares. About me.

Over the course of this summer of self-imposed seclusion I have been very fortunate to have a couple of true friends who check up on me daily. Just to make sure I'm still breathing. And I check up on them, too. Because that's what friends do.

I started therapy today, perhaps overdue, but you know me, I like to try doing things myself until I figure out I can't. I'm not in a bad place, but I haven't made any progress lately, and have lost a little ground here and there about some things while gaining ground in others. I already feel better just for having taken  a step. (Plus, it gets me out of the house, right?) Recovery is never easy and you shouldn't have to do it alone. So thank you all again for being there for me when I needed you. And especially you two, who have meant the world to me these past couple of months.

So now you all know how not to become a hermit. It's no way to live. And when you see or hear about some lonely old person, remember my words and don't become them. And maybe, just smile at them and say "Hi". That might be all it takes to bring them out of their shell.

What's up with August anyway?

I don't know how the rest of y'all's Facebook friends' birthdays shake out, but August has had me tapping the word "Happy" an awful lot this month, and we're not even halfway through it. In fact--because I'm weird and look these things up--August wins the prize for most birthdays. I have 283 Facebook friends, (I always feel like I have to qualify "friends" with "Facebook" because I have non-Facebook friends that I am extremely close to, friends who are on Facebook that I haven't friended or vice-versa for whatever reason, and Facebook friends I hardly know. Cyberspace and real life might overlap, but they are not the same thing. Besides, this way I can pretend that I have just as many friends as those of you who have thousands (!) of Facebook friends (how do you do that?), I just can't prove it.)

(Damn, they’re so…white…)

Some friendship networks are even more complicated.

http://friends.wikia.com/wiki/Relationships

Of those 283 friends, 238 have birthdays, so 45 of you don't have birthdays. (I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you just haven't published your birthdays and there's not some kind of Immaculate Conception thing going on.)

Perfect! There’s one candle for every month. That way I won’t miss anyone.

With this somewhat limited (but EXTREMELY diverse [understatement] sample) I have been able to draw some conclusions. Here is the birthday breakdown:

Birth  Month	Number  of Births
January	17
February	23
March	11
April	21
May	20
June	14
July	23
August	30
September	23
October	27
November	16
December	13

Now, it appears like there is a three way tie for third place--which would have been really cool because when ranking them they would have been in the same order whether I went Alphabetically or Chronologically (my inner OCD nerd would have rejoiced)--but that is not the case. When you factor in how many days there are in the given month, the percentage of births changes things.

I really only do it to play with the different colored markers.

Here's how that looks:

Birth  Month	Number  of Births	Number  of Days	Births per  Month %	Rank
August	30	31	97%	1
October	27	31	87%	2
February	23	28	82%	3
September	23	30	77%	4
July	23	31	74%	5
April	21	30	70%	6
May	20	31	65%	7
January	17	31	55%	8
November	16	30	53%	9
June	14	30	47%	10
December	13	31	42%	11
March	11	31	35%	12

That's right. August has 30 birthdays out of 31 days. Almost one a day. Compared to poor March barely making it to 1 out of every 3. What's going on here? That's a pretty big spread.

"Let’s go for 100 next time!" (Percent or birthdays?)

So--again, being me--I tried to spot a consistent thread in this data. To do that, I had to turn back the calendar, um, 9 months, give or take, depending on what part of the month you were born, if you were early, if you were late, etc. So, yeah, it gets icky here because we have to talk about your parents doing the nasty.

“Actually, all of the Friends were our sex-tuplets!” (Get it? Dad humor.)

Here's what we get from that:

Rank	Conception  Month	Conception  Season
1	November	Autumn
2	January	Winter
3	May	Spring
4	December	Autumn-Winter
5	October	Autumn
6	July	Summer
7	August	Summer
8	April	Spring
9	February	Winter
10	September	Summer-Autumn
11	March	Winter-Spring
12	June	Spring-Summer

I included the season column because that seemed to me to be one thing that might influence the outcomes. You know, in the summer it's hot, you're more apt to be tired from working or playing outside and so on. In the winter because it's cold outside and life is boring inside...well you get the picture. I was wrong.

Seems to me the old meanings of “hot and bothered” and “frigid” have been reversed.

With my own theory shattered I looked to see if there were any other trends. Here is what I found:

June, besides being at the bottom of the barrel for hanky-panky in general, marks the deepest dip between months. There is a 47% decrease from May-conceived births to June-conceived births, and increase of 35% of July-conceived births over June-conceived births. On the other side of things, July and August, resting in the middle of the pack, showed the most consistency for red hot love making in consecutive months, with only a 5% difference. My guess is August was trying to make up for June.

Otis Redding knew a thing or two.

If you really want the numbers here they are:

Rank	Conception  Month	Change from  Previous Month
1	July	35%
2	October	27%
3	May	27%
4	November	23%
5	April	13%
6	January	10%
7	August	-5%
8	March	-11%
9	September	-18%
10	December	-20%
11	February	-34%
12	June	-47%

So there’s really NOT a whole lot to be learned from this exercise beyond the fact that some months are just more laden with birthdays than others. And even that conclusion is suspect. Too many factors come into play here, too many variables. We’re talking about different birth years, different locations, different sex drives, and a shamefully small sample. Every birth story is as unique as the person that results from it. I guess that’s the real message here. It is pointless to compare ourselves to anyone else. We are who we are. Our stories are different. I came into this world with my own DNA and the events in my life that have happened to me since and how I’ve reacted to them have made me who I am. It is a story that is unique to me, just as yours is to you. Sure we may share common experiences, but how I experience them and how you do, by definition cannot be the same. My strengths and weaknesses are not the same as yours, and the intensity of the experiences themselves are no doubt different simply because I am here and you are there. We might be extremely similar, but we are not the same.

“I’m losing myself!” “No, you’re gaining another.”

We may also be very different from one another, but that doesn’t mean we don’t share some things. The human experience is not so varied that that we cannot find some common ground. We all breathe, we eat, we shit. And if August is any indication, a lot of us screw. We’re human. That’s where we must start our self examination. Not by comparing ourselves to others, but by understanding our own humanity. We are hardwired to think anyone who is different is at least suspicious, if not a dangerous enemy. It’s part of our survival instinct. But if we have aspirations to be civilized, to be a society in which every succeeding generation is better off than the last, we must rise above our baser instincts and offer the hand of friendship. Otherwise we are no better off than the ants.

Scenes from “The Bridge to Terabithia” and Galaxy Quest”.

If you don't mind bug videos, here ya go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq1r7MHt8y8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0HoqjxfvJ4

Yes. Ants are amazing, for something so small and easy to squash under our feet unnoticed. But they do not think independently. And they’re pretty much all the same. And being the same is not who we are. We are meant to think independently. That’s part of our survival instinct, too. And where individuality exists, differences exist. That is ultimately the choice. Either we embrace the fact that we are diverse—and ought to be—or we will succeed eventually in destroying ourselves, because in striving to eliminate everyone that is different from us we will set up the ultimate tournament bracket in which there can be only one.

“When they said ‘March Madness’, I thought they were talking about marching on Rome…or maybe the low number of March births.”

It’s in our nature. Some of the most vicious arguments I’ve witnessed, and sometimes participated in, are between people who are in 99.9% agreement, but the .1% that separated them/us was the one that was incendiary. Making a mountain out of an ant hill. We must rise above that or be swallowed up by it. It would be the august thing to do, friend.

“Yes, but did you know 7 ate 9?” Escher’s dad. “Or was it 7 of 9?”

It’s amazing what a little concealer and some extensions will do. But ain’t nothin’ gonna fix that attitude.

I am fairly happy that most of you were born. Happy as well that some of you actually take the time to read these rambling musings of mine. I started to talk about how unique you all are and got sidetracked by myself. Regardless of the date on the calendar, each of you is you-nique. It doesn’t matter what month you were born in. Or what year. Or where. Or what your circumstance. You are a one of a kind, and I choose to celebrate you every day, not just once a year. I may not like what you do or say sometimes and I’m sure the same can be said about me. But we are all special. So enjoy your day, whether it’s your birthday or not. Have some cake. Blow out some candles. Go and live your once in a lifetime life. Before Au-gust of wind blows your candle out.

“Really? You’re going to end on a bad pun using revered cultural icons? Show a little respect, dude.”

Sorry, it’s who I am.