19?

Didn't realize it'd been so long. I was writing pretty regularly. And then that stuff happened at the Safeway in Tucson and frankly, my musings seemed less important. Once the momentum was broken, I never thought about moving back to the blog and finishing the list.

Since then, I committed to a woman, she agreed, we got married, and that went perfectly. Well, except for the sermon at the wedding (going to be a point of contentious humor for the rest of our lives). Professionally, I'm still in the same place but that place it potentially better. Now I'm analyzing my data, having successfully defended my dissertation proposal in January. I hope to be done with the first draft soon, and ideally done with the project this summer. Then I'll walk, get hooded, and throw our lives into a blender and wonder what's going to come out.

So anyway, I'm going to try to finish the list.

#19 - Disrespecting your parents

This list was clearly written for high school girls. I don't think one should disrespect ones parents. But I did. Probably to much pain and anguish. I didn't do it due to a lack of respect, but due to a desire to do what I wanted anyway. There's a different between not respecting their wishes and disrespecting them. Sure, the prefix means "not", but the meaning is different. They wanted me to do certain things, and to not do other things. But I don't think I spent much time thinking their wishes were unwise or that they themselves weren't good people who didn't need to be listened to. I was a kid and frankly when a stubborn, outgoing, confident 13 year old boy wants to sneak out to talk to girls, whether your parents agree or not isn't really going to matter. I'd defend them to the end, and while this might be 20 years of 'after the fact' experience and reflection talking, tinged with quite a bit of missing my late father and not seeing enough of my mother (for my own selfish, my-fault reasons), I respect my parents more than anything in the world. And anyone who disagrees, or slights them that didn't know them as family can fight me.

I hope that when I have kids, that those kids are better-behaved than I was, but love me and want to support me like I do now for my mom.

Miss you dad.