August 3 You would think I would learn. After ten
years of doing it over and over again, you would think I would wise up. But
every time leads to the same disappointment.
It is like when I turned 30 and no one wished me Happy Birthday and I had a miserable day. After that I decided that if I wanted a great birthday it was up to me to make it great. And every since then I have taken the day off from work and filled it with things I love to do: movies, coffee shop, hardware store, etc.
And so I have come to the conclusion that other things are just like my birthday: if I want to make it great then it is up to me. And I should wait around for something that'll likely never happen.
We stop at Gettysburg every return trip. I have always been a civil war fan, and the idea of hiking through a real battlefield is something I always look forward to. The rest of the family? Tolerates it to a point. And over the years that point has continually diminished.
A few years ago I started a new tradition. Rather than waiting around the hotel room for hours until the family was ready to leave for an afternoon of pure boredom, I would rise early and go do my activities. And when they were ready? They called my cell phone and I would go pick them up.
I have decided I need to expand this tradition to the point where I simply don't go pick them up. We'll still go to dinner at Tommy's Pizza - we all love that. And maybe catch a ghost tour in the evening together. But that is all the family enjoys, and I am torturing them and myself by forcing them through endless tours and hikes and stories they really didn't care for the first ten times they heard them.
The Gettysburg experience is therefore going to change. It will no longer be me boring my family by sharing one of my passions. Instead, I will be set free and liberated to explore uninhibited and on my own.
It is like when I turned 30 and no one wished me Happy Birthday and I had a miserable day. After that I decided that if I wanted a great birthday it was up to me to make it great. And every since then I have taken the day off from work and filled it with things I love to do: movies, coffee shop, hardware store, etc.
And so I have come to the conclusion that other things are just like my birthday: if I want to make it great then it is up to me. And I should wait around for something that'll likely never happen.
We stop at Gettysburg every return trip. I have always been a civil war fan, and the idea of hiking through a real battlefield is something I always look forward to. The rest of the family? Tolerates it to a point. And over the years that point has continually diminished.
A few years ago I started a new tradition. Rather than waiting around the hotel room for hours until the family was ready to leave for an afternoon of pure boredom, I would rise early and go do my activities. And when they were ready? They called my cell phone and I would go pick them up.
I have decided I need to expand this tradition to the point where I simply don't go pick them up. We'll still go to dinner at Tommy's Pizza - we all love that. And maybe catch a ghost tour in the evening together. But that is all the family enjoys, and I am torturing them and myself by forcing them through endless tours and hikes and stories they really didn't care for the first ten times they heard them.
The Gettysburg experience is therefore going to change. It will no longer be me boring my family by sharing one of my passions. Instead, I will be set free and liberated to explore uninhibited and on my own.
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