2010

It's early to be posting this, I know. But I just want to do this now before I put it off, or forget, or whatever. Or maybe I just wish the year would be over already.

It's been utter shit, pretty much from start to finish.

I'm not even sure if I have it in me to give a thorough rundown, but maybe I'll try. We'll start from the beginning, I guess.

2009 ended on a sour note. Of that, we're all in agreement. 2010 was supposed to be the year when everything got better, when the economy picked back up and work and life resumed. The eggheads that made that prediction couldn't have been more wrong, at least for the first part of the year.

I watched as hours at work dried up, eventually a co-worker and a good friend of mine just quit because they were giving him weeks and weeks without scheduled work, instead using him as a call-boy to pick up odd spots here and there. After working for a company for five years, he figured (rightly) that this kind of shit isn't right. And so he left, and I wondered who'd be next on the block.

Spring was a dry time. Relationships collided and ended in spectacular fashion. I wasn't part of any of them. I was mostly driven to focus on my impending school in the fall, but come June, I had no idea just how hard it was going to get. My boss at work was transferred to a new store, and his replacement had an... unorthodox way of running things. I watched as hours shrank more and more, until finally I was practically unemployed, picking up a token shift that didn't even cover gas money to get there, while employees two years my junior were picking up 12 to 20 hours a week. My value and self esteem at this point were just flat bottom, so pretty much throughout summer, I was more or less unemployed.

Bad enough without more bad news on other fronts. My uncle, who's always been the kind of voice of the family, was diagnosed with throat cancer over the summer. It was already rough because his daughter was diagnosed with lung cancer about a year ago at this point, and when we went to go visit him, his daughter (who is also a nurse now) was the one running the machines that injected the drugs and stuff. There was something horribly wrong about the whole thing, like I was living a scene out of some medieval plague painting where skeletons were feeding other skeletons, and everything was all just death under the reaper's scythe.

By August, things had reached a breaking point at home and at work. I reviewed my application for school, and figured if work wasn't going anywhere I might as well go back to school, even if it took a loan and a lot of belt tightening to do it. So I printed up my resignation letter and resolved my self to put to bed this shit, so that I could focus on my family and my future.

But I figured I should track down my old boss and let him know what was up, because he'd always done right by me and everyone else, and to this day, remains a model manager and leader. I guess this is one of the few good points for this year, because he pretty much offered to transfer me on the spot, with a few hours a week to start, and more if business picked up.

Business did pick up, and I'm quite satisfied by how that situation resolved itself, but the issues of family were still bad. My grandfather suffered a stroke about a year and a half ago, and has gradually progressed into a state of dementia. This year was the worst. He was frequently paranoid and angry, often yelling at my grandmother because he would get frustrated with day-to-day activities. Eventually he fell down some stairs and hurt himself pretty bad, but when grandma brought the paramedics in, he waved them off and proceeded to rage for the rest of the week because his hip hurt and he couldn't remember why.

Eventually we managed to con him into a hospital for treatment, which has been a debacle that's still too painful to account properly. I can't stand the thought of my grandfather, the most hard-bitten upstanding individual I've ever known, reduced to a drooling invalid because they couldn't control him without sedating him nearly to death. And as if that wasn't hard enough, my grandmother had a stroke two weeks after grandpa was admitted. So in the span of a month, my grandparents were both hospitalized, and the realization came on that they wouldn't be returning home, so we were left with the task of cleaning everything out, selling what we could, storing what we could, and then finally selling the house (itself a painful task, because every asshole in Spruce Grove showed up for the private sale to offer insultingly low-balled bids).

Probably the most disquieting thing about the whole affair was the knives we found while clearing the house out. Every room had a knife hidden somewhere in it. Army knives. Steak knives. Butcher knives. Cleavers. We didn't know why, but in his paranoia, it was likely my grandfather was stashing them in case some unseen threat broke into the house. But given his state, he could have just as easily turned them on grandma. It was a sorry state of affairs, and even now, it doesn't feel like everything's settled, even though the house is sold and grandma and grandpa are both in hospital facilities that are looking after them (finally).

University has been okay, but at every turn, I'm questioning the value of a degree. There is such a culture of idiocy surrounding post-secondary education that I, for a few weeks, considered dropping out and just hitting the road for a few months. We'll see if my ultimate decision to stay was the right one.

Do I want 2010 to end? Definitely. Do I wish 2011 would be better? Yes.
Will reality bend to my will? Probably not.