This was a rather peaceful and uneventful Valentine’s Day, which honestly isn’t a bad thing. There’s good and bad that goes along with being single, eh? =) Anyways, since my tentative significant other and I are not aware of each other yet (or at least not aware that we’re each others’ significance), I will get all mushy in other ways.
I really enjoy the fact that I have over a decade of my life in blog form and I’ve missed talking about major events in the past just because I figured “oh, I’ll remember it, I don’t need to tell the world about it.” While generally true, I do sometimes go back through my blog archive and think “oh darn, I didn’t mention anything about _?” One day I’ll come back and find this blog post and value that my past self took the time to jot all this down, so here it is.
December was a rough month for my family as my dad passed away suddenly after being in the hospital for about two weeks after a severe heart attack. I haven’t really mentioned this to the webs at large as I guess I’ve been processing all of this, and I’m not looking for a pity party. Anyways, along with this came a lot of drama, headache, and heartache, some expected and some not. Despite all the negatives though, what I will ultimately remember is the outpouring of love from all kinds of sources that my family and I were blessed with.
I don’t particularly want to get into a theological debate right now, but I want to take an aside before continuing. As an educated “intellectual” (if I can be so presumptuous to call myself one ;)), there are a lot of things about Christianity that don’t seem to make sense. This is further clouded by the fact that many “Christians” don’t act very Christ like at all. That said, without what I believe as a Christian, the world would seem so pointless and meaningless. I would be a slave of physics, ultimately doing whatever the atoms making up my body “decided” should be done. I don’t see the value in a concept like love if all there is to it is a bunch of atoms behaving a certain way to ultimately trigger certain chemical reactions in two larger blobs of atoms.
I’m convinced this “love” thing is special and I don’t think the type of special I’m talking about could exist in a world without meaning. I believe that there is a God that gives us meaning and his greatest gift to us was Love, which we, here on earth, sometimes manage to gift to each other and/or experience in peculiar ways. Maybe I’m a romantic, I don’t know. =p
Okay, with that said, I wanted to take Valentine’s Day as a chance to say thank you for the love that I have been gifted, consciously or otherwise. I’ll start off silly by being thankful for Mozilla. Dogs (and many pets, I guess) are a conduit for a very basic type of love, and while it’s taken me a while to fully realize this, getting Mozilla was a way for me to deal with all the negativity that December brought. Mozilla helped me combat that negativity by providing a very healthy positive type of stress that anyone who’s raised a puppy they love can understand. I don’t want to get all caught up in talk of fate or whatnot, but I consider myself extremely blessed to have happened upon such a perfect puppy for me. When I decided I would get a puppy and started searching, there was only one breeder that I found that had a litter at just the right time for me to get one almost immediately (it’s not uncommon for people to be on waitlists approaching months to get a shiba from a reputable breeder). Mozilla was the only one left of the litter because his breeder was considering keeping him unless she found the right home. It’s kind of silly I guess, but to me, Mozilla will always be a bit of a symbol of the love that everyone below showed during a rough time in my life.
To my job, who basically let me take the entirety of December off with no questions asked, thank you. Corporate entities are probably amongst some of the least “loving” things out there, but in the way it could, my job was there for me and I’m thankful for that…
To my friends, who were there for me and my family through the ups and downs of an emotional roller-coaster, you sat in silence with me, held me as my walls crumbled, fed me, did my dishes, made me laugh, checked in on me, sent me words of encouragement, and even trekked to Arkansas and back in a day with me. You did these things, big and small, and will never think anything more of it than it being your duty as a friend…
To friends of my family, you gave us food, visited, and probably did a ton of things I don’t even realize…
To my mother and sisters, who shared my pain and more, we show love to each other in quirky ways (or maybe it’s just the way I show it =)). We were hurt together but I would never wish for any other family…
Happy Valentine’s Day, may love find you all. =)
