The New and Improved Cynical Idealist

A Whole New Me.

Let me start this by saying, I've been gone a while - a long while. I haven't written in this blog in something like 8 years or so. A lot has changed since then. This blog was originally called 'Ramblings of an Overworked Pessimist,' yeah i'm not that guy anymore. I mean, I guess I'm still a bit of a pessimist kind of but not nearly the diva that I was. Work had a lot to do with that. Let me just say for anyone whose ever wondered about traveling the world, do it - if you can afford it that is. It ain't cheap. Nothing gives you perspective like seeing a different country with a different culture. Granted - I didn't do this for leisure, work told me to go so I went. After 11 years of living out of a suitcase, I don't want to look back nor do I want to really leave my little corner of the Appalachian Mountains.

With that said, I'm not in that line of work anymore. I don't miss it, and I don't like wasting thoughts on it, and here I am talking about it like an idiot. I get to go home every night now. The home dynamic has changed of course. 8 years ago, I had a fiance and 2 kids. Well that didn't work out, she's now an ex-fiance.

While traveling in Australia, fate decided to gift me an encounter with a beauty that is either blind to my strange ugliness, or oblivious to my eccentricities or both. One thing led to another and so-on and so forth, that beauty is now my wife. I still think she's a psycho for marrying me though. A few years passed, now we're parents - me again, her for a first time. It's weird being the one who knows what they're doing this time. I'm loath to admit it, but I sucked at babies the first and second times.

So here we are in the present. We've got a baby that wants to walk but can't, so she gets mad that her balance sucks. She crawls at warp speed and has the courtesy to close the baby gate behind her which is kind of odd in 2 senses: the first being that I could have sworn I closed it, and second - it's just weird that she turns around and purposefully closes the baby gate. It's like that guy who always pushes his chair in even though he's going to sit back down in it in a minute or two.

Those nuances just kind of strike me in a way that make me laugh.

I legit have a daughter whose favorite hot dog topping is sour cream - SOUR CREAM. I'm not an expert but that's got to be on like an 'Am I a Serial Killer' checklist. It's funny, but it's just weird. I've got another that eats almost nothing but likes watching food getting prepared. Her diet consists of chicken nuggets and boiled eggs, but she likes watching my wife and I make something we know damn well she's not going to eat like she's studying to be a michelin chef.

Now with all this in mind, they're all girls. All 3 of them. I live in a mire of "Frozen" and "Animal Crossing" theme songs, and the occasional minefield of Legos. Mixed in with all that, I'm a working class guy with a working class vocabulary that married someone who speaks metric and eats veggiemite. If you haven't tried it, don't. It's disgusting. Seriously I don't know how Australians can eat it with a straight face. It's like if salt was condensed into a black paste and then dropped outside on the ground and put into a jar.

I was told once that I was eating it wrong. Yeah, like it was my fault that it tasted like crap. I was told that you have to put butter and jam on it. So the logic in the end is: Take something that tastes like pureed anchovies turned into a pudding, and cover with stuff that actually tastes good. No. That's just a lot of extra steps.

This viewpoint annoys my wife, and really she's a saint for putting up with me and my idiocy, but seriously Australia, what the hell were you thinking with Veggiemite?