Through These Fields of Destruction, Baptisms of Fire

I've watched all your suffering, as the battles raged higher.
And though they did hurt me so bad,
In the fear and alarm,
You did not desert me,
My brothers in arms.

'Brothers in Arms' - Dire Straits

The great karmic bitchslap. That is what this has turned into. I said when everything started that somehow it was all going to come back and bite me in the ass. And did it ever. Through a mostly predictable series of events, I am now reliving last spring's problems, but through the eyes of the people around me. Not only that, but while I had mostly gotten over it (as much as one can...and to think that fact turned into proper advice...), it was still distressing to more or less get the answer I, for better or worse, did not want.

On the one hand I'm fine with it. I'm happy to be there and to do what I can. However it is so strange that everything I'm saying is basically everything I had to tell myself. The difference this time is that there was actually something tangible happening, whereas mine was the fool's errand of myself and those around me. While that changes the nature of the advice to some degree, it also makes it that much harder to figure out what advice that should be. I can speak to failure, I can speak to the how-to's of moving on. I can't speak to the what-ifs and what could have been's, because I don't know how those actually end.

And this brings me back to something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I'm starting to wonder if the thing I want the most isn't also the thing that I need the least. As much as I've been torn up, both by the current goings-on and those before, I wonder if it is truly worth it. Problem is I've tried the other side, doing nothing. That went equally has poorly. At what point do I at least figure out where the real problem lies. I've always told myself that the problem lay in the obvious reasons, the ones that everyone can see. Those are the ones that I can work hard to fix, I just haven't tried as hard as I should. If the problem is something else, something not so easy to see, well than it stems out of the things in which I take the greatest pride, and means that I truly don't know what to do.

In the better parts of life, I got to spend the weekend with family. While it was not terribly exciting (I'm sorry, I just can't sit around watching movies for that many hours), it was still good to have five of my kids around, all of which I'd missed terribly. Words cannot describe the joy that they all bring me, even when they are little whores (that's right Jessica, I said it).

Think that'll have to do for now. Gotta take care of dinner so I can't keep droning on and on. Should be an interesting week coming up. I'll be back into the normal swing of things at work, and while doing so I'll be trying to fix everything I wrote about today. My job is an exercise in futility, why shouldn't everything else?