Heartaches, Hard Knocks and Things I Don't Know

I'm a fan of Garth Brooks' music. I'm not hard core, fawning over him, but I do like his songs a lot. The title of this post is a lyric from "When There's No One Around," a song off his Sevens album. He talks about a man so immature but he's still my best friend, just one of the boys who gets lost in the crowd, and how it's four in the morning and a tape of his failures playing inside his head.

This song reminds me of me, a lot. I'm bad about lying awake and thinking about everything bad, wrong or embarrassing I've ever done, and how I still fight the battles of 25 years ago. I can still get worked up over things that happened eons ago, thinking of what I wish I'd done, even though the healthy thing would be to let them go and focus, really focus, on the future. And before you know it, it's time to get up and your blood is still boiling over something that's long since out of sight. And everyday it's a challenge to let go of the past, to release and forgive myself and live.

Which brings us to our learning experience of the week.

Wednesday morning I chose to drop my pre-calculus class at UA. It just got to be too much. I thought that throwing time at the problem, it'd work itself out. But I never seemed to get very far in terms of my assignments in relation to how long I spent on them. And I'd not had a math class or looked at algebra rules (GRE buildup notwithstanding) since 1994. In addition, all this was being thrown at me three and four lessons at a time during lecture. Not a lot of time to soak up lessons. When you add in that I'm working 40 hours a week at the Census office, it was more than I could take. I got home Tuesday night at 9:30 after work with three homework assignments and three quizzes to bang out, plus study for a test the next morning. I was tired and defeated.

We'll look at some things and rework the plan and move forward. I have the best woman on the planet in my corner, who is uber-supportive as I look for a direction to go in. If I could learn to fly, I'd never touch down.