Back to Work

Well it's Wednesday now and I'm back at work. I actually called in "sick" this morning, but decided that I "felt better" this afternoon so here I am. I'm SO sick of this job; I'd much rather be practicing right now. Speaking of which, last night, my first night practicing for the audition this Saturday, went alright. There's still a lot of work to be done, but I feel like it will probably be fairly productive over the next few days.

After work today, I'm going to have dinner with my stepdad who's in the bay area for the week taking some courses for his police stuff (he's a policeman...duh :p). My mom and him live down in the LA area so it's not so often I get to see either of them, so I'm looking forward to it. My dad and stepmom live over in Reno (which is a h*ll of a lot closer, 3 hours vs. 7 hours to be precise), which is kind of funny because I visit my mom and get to see her even more often than my dad. Maybe it's just that motherly connection...

As long as I'm on the subject, why don't I tell you more about my parents and why they are where they are today. Without going into to much detail, when they were together, my dad was an alcoholic/semi-drug addict and abusive (at least from stories told to me by my older brother and mother). He was abusive more on a mental level than anything; cold, distant, and playing mind games (again, all second-hand information). My mother was and is very hurt about that marriage and still carries it with her to some degree today. She is a very emotional and open person (some would say too open ;), but all in all, means well. My dad today is a great guy, too, and I don't remember enough of my childhood to see him as anything but a great guy and father. I'm lucky because my older brother beared through that part of his life and tried his best to protect his younger siblings (me and my younger brother).

The inevitability of that situation was divorce, and it occurred as I was in high school. Both my parents eventually remarried and moved there separate ways; Mom to Southern California, and Dad to Reno, Nevada. But I decided to finish out my high school days (about 2 1/2 more years) staying where I had started, in Central California. I lived with a friend of the family who was kind enough to open her house to almost any strangers, and who lived a very religious life. I personally stopped going to church after my parents moved away and have been doing my own spiritual searching ever since (or no searching at all). So I lived with very limited supervision and did some stupid things and some not-so-stupid things, and eventually graduated high school for the most part unscathed and as one of the salutatorians (that's another story). I came to the bay area for college at CSU, Hayward, finished my BA, and that pretty much brings me up to this point in my life.

That's a very rough outline without a whole lot of details, but you get the gist. So getting back to today, after I go to dinner with my stepdad, I'll be coming back to practice somemore. For now, I guess I should actually get some work done. Or maybe I'll go post on some drum corps forums first :D. Tschuess (go to http://babel.altavista.com/ and translate that from German to English if you want to figure out what that means, and if that doesn't work, leave a message and ask :p).