This thread illustrates why this site is so special to me.
It's not just a Packer site. It's a people site. Frankly, if it were just a Packer site, I would have left long ago. The quality of Packer content here is as high or higher than any other site I've visited, but given the fucked up state I'm in most of the time right now, I'm not living/breathing Packers the way I did even five years ago. But I come here and I'm reassured that there are real people left in the world. Flawed people, of course -- we live in a fallen world -- but real and worth spending time.
I come here in part because I see people having shitty problems and dealing with them; people like you, Kevin, and Shawn and Rourke and Alan and Julie and Foster and zombie and others whose "real world" names I don't know, who I see as role models. Not because you are perfect, but because you aren't perfect and you deal with imperfections and fuckups and fuckheads better than I do, and it gives me hope.
I come here because I see people with shitty problems still helping others. But not out of busy-bodiness. I hate busybodies. In part because I hate it when people try to make me into something I'm not thinking that will make me happier rather than more miserable. And in part because I hate the fact that I have listened too much to the criticism of those busybodies over the years, to my detriment.
For example, several years ago I went through a pre-tenure review. It came back much more negative than I expected going in. So much so that I came about as close to losing my job at that stage of my career as one can come and still keep it. So much so that I knew I had to make major changes if I wanted to make tenure where I was. So I made changes, and I made tenure.
And yet those changes were serious mistakes. Sometime along the way I realized that in listening to the busybodies, I had -- again -- trusted badly. Oh, sure, I had tenure. But "the improvements" meant I had actually become a worse teacher than I was before that original review. And now I find myself stuck, having to do now what I should have done several years ago, but now carrying around several years of extra baggage, yet past 50 with no more marketable skills than I had when I was 40.
But I'm not blaming the busybodies. I'm blaming me.
I'm blaming me for listening to the wrong people, for trusting the judgment of the busybodies over my own.
But it's more than that, too. Because I've also realized that if I'm going to turn it around, I still can't do it alone. Because, while I'm a pretty smart guy, I've also spent more of my life making bad judgment calls for that life than I've spent making good ones. I know that I still need mentors and role models.
Not because I want to please them -- that's always been one of my big mistakes. But because they have experience and wisdom that I don't have.
You people here have taught me that.
You've taught me that even as you've provided a lot of that wisdom and experience for me.
Because while you all are caring people, you aren't busybodies. (And that includes you, Rourke -- you may be here just as an escape, but you still provide experience and wisdom to me; a lot of it. You may claim to be a shallow, oversexed asshole, but you're not. Well, maybe the oversexed part.)
Maybe its because I'm just a sorry-ass human being stunted in my emotional and personal development that I need the internet for all this. (I know that's what some of the busybodies in my "physical" life think, to the extent they give a fuck about me at all.) But so be it.
All I know is that I'm a better human being for having hung out with you people over the last 14 months.
To be honest, I've found myself liberated here. There are still times I worry about something I say here getting back to the PC powers-that-be and losing my job. (Decades-long-habits of being a pinhead don't go away in a few months.) But there are fewer times when it stops me all the time. Because, quite frankly, I've come to realize that this community gives me a crapload of necessary stuff that my job doesn't. Necessary stuff that means I'd rather lose my job than lose this community that Foster brought me into in August of 2009.
I wish I had the deep, life-long relationships that some people have. I wish I had mentors I could call or learn from as an apprentice human being. I wish, really wish, I had that one "soul mate" to live with.
And maybe, someday, I will. Because that's another thing you all have shown me -- you've given me that hope of possibility.
You've shown me that, even though I'm pretty much as fucked up as ever, that there's a tunnel where light shines at the other end. You've shown me that there are indeed people out there in the world worthy of trust and worthy of treating as example. Real people, not comic book heros OR busybodies. Just everyday people, fallen people, with competencies and strengths over overcoming their weaknesses and those of others.
To my mind there are three sane pieces in my life right now: my God, my dog, and PackersHome.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)