Dark to Light (and back again)

I was just starting to settle down and get back into a life rhythm that felt a little more positive than before when I got hit with another wonderful (read: sarcasm) round of bad news.  Long story short, my father was diagnosed with a hereditary liver disease.  It's definitely treatable, but left unchecked (as it had been in my father for years) could lead to serious issues down the road.  He emailed each of us, letting us know the deal so we can get checked out, and I'm gathering up the steam to do just that.  When I went through the year of getting prepped for the kidney donation, one of the biggest hurdles I had to get over was bad liver counts - a real Spartan existence with regards to diet and exercise helped a lot, but now I'm wondering if maybe this thing my father has may have been trying to rear its ugly head earlier.

All that to say that every time I looked at the dour black of the blog - the blackness I purposefully changed because I was feeling so crappy - was now reminding me that I felt crappy, and goading me into continuing to feel crappy.

Which I don't want to do.  At all.  So I changed it back to the original, brighter format. 

I also went out during lunch and picked up a new box of Legos for Jack, the next stage from the massive baby blocks we've been using, but still not the small edible pieces of destruction we all used as kids.  Another couple of years before those, I'm figuring - it's amazing what he'll occasionally think to put in his mouth.  I also bought a small toy helicopter and airplane: nothing big or fancy, but he's been on a big airplane kick lately, pretending to fly whenever he's in the tub, lying face down with his arms outstretched.  And now all I'm thinking about is getting home so we can open them together, and build an airport to park them on.

On a completely different topic, I realized that I'm really attracted to ending a lot of my writing with a simple sentence or two, trying to encapsulate the gist of whatever I was writing into something simple and, hopefully, truthful.  A shallow little nugget of wisdom, an apology for taking so long to get to the point.

I wonder if there's some connection between that and my need, my wish, to wrap everything in my life up the same way, a neat and tidy package that people will see and remark, "ah, how nice," and I realize I'm doing it again...