From the Brain of Matty

what a week (22.03.05 5:35 pm)

Well, I managed to survive the most turbulent week of my life. On Saturday we found out Shell was pregnant; on Tuesday she was worried about some minor blood spotting; on Thursday we found out it was an early miscarriage; and now, everything is "back to normal".

It's really amazing. For a couple of days I was a father. And for those couple of days I was a different person. You can't realise how much it changes you until it happens. Not just the obvious things, like money and seriousness(?) and those sorts of things.. your whole self-image changes. For a few days I was a different person. And then, like a giant rubber band, I was snapped back into my "old self".. except that I've seen the other me, and I don't know that I'll be again quite the same as I was before. (What an awkward, overly sombre, and cliche sentence. It's true, though.)

Shell stopped crying by about Friday or Saturday, and then Mum phoned and hadn't read her email, so I was faced with the joy of having to tell her. I didn't talk for very long. It was the first time I actually said it out loud, and it was the first time I cried over it. Of course, my typically mannish response to the emotions was to swallow them down into a little steel ball in my belly, and then slowly transfer it to my shoulders, where all emotions belong. So of course now I'm in quite a bit of pain, and in need of a good massage / neck rub.

As retail therapy, we spent the remainder of Shell's credit on furniture (we picked up our couch, and bought a dishwasher and a tv cabinet thing). Now we're broke.

I'm back into programming, because I haven't done it for ages, and I really like it. It's the zone I get into best. I'm writing a routine to read, parse, and interpret a scripting language (which I'm also inventing). I also helped Glen hack up his game code a bit.

Right now I'm taking a tute, which involves completing excercises from two chapters of the text... so the students don't need me much.

But I can't think straight anyway. So it's probably a good thing they don't need me. I'm having enough trouble just arranging my thoughts to write them down. I've gotten most of them out now. I'll get back to being a teacher.

Ciao all! Be well.
Matty /<

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