A Dark And Quiet Room

written on 8/5/2002

It’s 9:30 p.m. but I’m feeling pretty good. I just kicked out a large amount of COBOL and, Lord willing, I should be done tomorrow. What a relief that will be! Part of the reason is that I spent an absurd amount of time on Saturday doing nothing but COBOL. Crystal and I went out to breakfast with another couple, which was quite enjoyable, and then I came home and started coding. I started at 1:00. I didn’t stop until 9:00.

It’s not my idea of an enjoyable day. I like programming, but coding COBOL is like kicking a dead whale down a beach, to use the classic hacker phrase. (“Kicking a dead whale down a beach� is a long, difficult, smelly, pointless task.)

But it’s almost done, and I’ll be able to enjoy GenCon this weekend without having it hanging over my head.

That’s right. I’m going to GenCon. Hooray! For those of you who don’t know, GenCon is the largest gaming convention in the country. Last year I was able to make it to Origins (the second largest convention), but I was working. This year I’m going as a civilian. The convention lasts from Thursday until Sunday. For a host of reasons I can’t go for the duration of the convention. Instead, I’m leaving Friday evening and driving up to Milwaukee, where the convention is held. (Next year it moves to Indianapolis, which I think is actually closer.) I’ll crash with Jason Blair Friday night and spend Saturday hanging out with folks that I’ve met over the Internet. Partly I’m hoping to put faces to names and network a bit. Partly, I just want to have some fun. I won’t have the pressure of having to sell anything. I can wander a bit and chat with folks that I know. I’ll probably even be able to get some gaming done. It should be fun.

But that’s actually next week’s topic. After all, I haven’t gone yet. Instead, I want to talk about my birthday.

I had a very pleasant birthday. My wife and sister planned a bit of a surprise for me. They picked me up from work and took me out to the gaming store in Washington. Then they handed me an
envelope with money and a card good for one copy of the Unknown Armies roleplaying game (2nd edition). So I went in, and I got my copy of UA 2nd.

I wasn’t expecting a birthday present, and I definitely wasn’t expecting this. I have the first edition of UA, but the newer edition has a lot more material and is better organized. Besides that, four
of the sentences in it are mine. That’s right. Look in the credits of the book and you’ll see my name. They even spelled it right!

So I picked up all 336 pages of gaming goodness and decided to put the rest of the money towards a computer game that I was wanting. (I ordered it online later that night.) Then we went out to eat at the Chinese buffet.

When we got home, I was greeted with banners, decorations, and a barrage of Silly String. Crystal had bought a small cake and topped it with twenty-five trick candles, which I still managed to extinguish without using water. (I’m so proud of me.) Then, after the children went to bed, we ended the evening with cheese, crackers, wine, and a viewing of that classic movie, Surf Ninjas. Cultured we are. Oh yes.

(Aside: if you’ve never seen Surf Ninjas, you really should. It is a farce of bad martial arts movies and bad surfer movies. One of my favorite scenes is when Zatch, the trained martial artist, fights a sword-wielding attacker with a pair of chopsticks. Don’t take too seriously, but do watch it.)

And so I turned twenty-five. It was a good day.

In a way, though, it was a milestone, though I didn’t think about it at the time. In addition to turning twenty-five, last Wednesday was also the fifth birthday that I spent with my wife. We
were married June 22, 1997, just over a month before my birthday.

(Do the math. That’s right. Married at 19. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.)

So I started thinking about my life when I was twenty, compared with my life now. So let’s have a look, shall we?

I was born at 9:46 a.m. on July 31, 1977. July 31, 1997 was a Saturday. At 9:46 a.m. I was at work. I had been there since 6:00. Or maybe it was 7:00. I’m not really sure. I know that my normal work hours were 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Of course, I lived 30 minutes away, so I had to get up at 4:50 to get to work on time. I used to fill a 64 oz. cup with coffee to drink on the drive to work.

But I’m fairly sure that Saturdays were different. Or maybe not. At least they were only a half-day. I got off at 10:00 or so. Or something like that. As I try to look back, my life is one big blur. You’ll see why in a moment.

I was working in a plastics shop. Actually, I was assembling Little Tykes toys. Mostly I worked on toy xylaphones. The plastic body was molded elsewhere and shipped to us. It had about eight holes drilled in it by a drill press. Then the rest of the line attached the wheels, the bars, and the striker on a cord. Usually I did wheels, but sometimes I ran the press. Of course, plastic shavings would get everywhere, and they wouldn’t go away. They’d get in your hair, in your clothes, down in your shoes. Inevitably I’d track some reddish-orange plastic shavings home with me.

Home life was challenging, too. Crystal and I were into our first month of marriage, which is the phase where you begin to learn how to live with each other. That is such a happy, wonderful thought when you are engaged, but it becomes difficult when you’re arguing about how to do the dishes (or whatever other stupid stuff we argued about). Even more, we had discovered that Crystal was pregnant with a honeymoon baby, and she had terrible morning sickness. So I would come home, dirty and tired, to a house that hadn’t been cleaned and where no supper awaited me, because my wife had been too sick to get out of bed.

And home…. Home was a small apartment in North East. We had a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom. We had started married life with a waterbed, but it had sprung a leak, and we were sleeping in the living room. None of the rooms were on the same level. The kitchen was higher than the living room and bedroom, and I’ll bet that they weren’t level with each other, either. Sometimes the smell of marijuana would waft up from the apartment below us. The entire apartment must have been on one electrical line, because if we wanted to run the microwave, we had to turn off everything. All the lights. All the fans. The computer. Everything. What was worse, the circuit breaker box was in a different apartment, so if we blew something, I had to go around and get the landlord to reset the breaker. All in all, it was a classic “just got marriedâ€? apartment. We paid $300 a month for it.

I remember struggling on my twentieth birthday. Life was hard. I didn’t want to be at work, slaving to build cheap toys for children. I wanted to be home with my family. Birthdays are supposed to be something special.

But at the same time, it was special. Like I said, life from that time is a blur, but I have memories of my first birthday with my wife. I remember that she went out and bought me a deck of Middle Earth cards for another game. (I still have them. I dug them out and showed them to her as I was writing this journal.) They were only $8.00 or so, but they were what we could afford, and they were special, because she was making an effort to understand me and what I liked. At the time, she thought that all my games were crazy. (She has since turned to the dark side.) But she tried to get me something special.

She also put together a birthday party for my family and a couple of friends. I have a hard time remembering everyone who showed up, but I know that we packed at least ten people into that tiny apartment. It was her first time cooking for that many people, too. I don’t even remember what we had, but I remember that I really enjoyed it. I also seem to recall a water balloon fight before the party that ranged both in and out of the apartment. I think that we all lost.

Life was hard. Part of it was simply adjusting to being a real adult with real responsibilities and a real person relying on me for food and shelter. Part of it was that life was really challenging. But I also remember my birthday as being a bright spot in a hard time.

And now, as I cast my gaze over the past five years, I can see how God has been good to us. Until our move here, our housing cost didn’t increase past $350. We moved from the tiny apartment in North East to a larger apartment in the city, from there to a small house on Brandes Avenue, and then finally into the house that we bought on East 30th Street. Each time we upgraded our housing. Each time the cost remained about the same.

The birthdays continued. Crystal became more adept at throwing the parties. On my twenty-first birthday, my mother hurt her ankle trying to climb down from a tree in my yard. My twenty-second birthday was Tolkien-themed, as I recall, complete with music downloaded from the Internet. My twenty-third birthday was my first Japanese-themed party, complete with elegant tiger lily arrangements on tables set up in the back yard. My twenty-fourth birthday was simpler, but that was when the entire family schemed to buy me a pond for the back yard. And now, my twenty-fifth birthday. First a surprise party back in Erie that was an elaborate tea ceremony, and now a party here.

And life has improved over that time, too. Crystal and I have grown through the trials and become closer to each other. Her next two pregancies were not nearly as hard on her. I have three children whom I love dearly. And somehow along the way we have managed to improve our style of living somewhat. I look around my library while I write. I have my swords on their stand. I have the computer that I am using to write this journal entry. I have a stack of movies that still needs to be organized. I have CDs and software and boardgames and books. For crying out loud, I have a separate room that I can set aside as a library. I’ve never had that luxury before.

Life is good.

But even more than that, I look back over the last five years and see how I have changed. When I first married Crystal, I was a prosaic thinker. Poetry was no good unless it hewed close to the Rules of Poetry. Beauty was not an issue.

I could be very grumpy.

I was a pretty poor husband at times.

But I have changed. God has shown me an entirely new realm to be explored in the area of aesthetics. I have been given more control over my emotions. I think that I’m doing a better job at being a good husband.

God is good.

There are times that life seems very hard. Like now. Right now, life seems very hard. In those times, it can seem like we aren’t getting anywhere, that life is always bad. In these times, it can help to stop and pause to take stock of your life.

Right now life is hard, but I can see the progress. God is still good to us. He is still working in me. I am much better off now then I was when I was twenty. And, Lord willing, I’ll be able to say the same when I am thirty.

Something to consider when your next birthday rolls around.