🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Hollow🎶
Empathy😊
Pre-Grad Drinking🧉
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- A great Friday/Saturday of graduation celebrations.
- My in-law family.
- Wifey Poo being an amazing mother.
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Connections
Puzzle #336
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The song in my head when I woke up: “Hollow,” by Alice in Chains
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: Bleeding impressions where you were tied/Can’t really say how you lost your mind
Tunes: No music of late.
Something I’m looking forward to today: Celebrating Wifey Poo’s motherhood awesomeness by making her my special honey-glazed salmon.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Starting my new job tomorrow.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Being there when Boy The Elder graduated. Wow. What. A. Day.
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved some journaling about the weekend and BTE’s graduation.
What I’ve written: The Power of Empathy: It is easy for Michael Miller to recount the most important lesson he learned in Northwestern’s MBA + MS in Design Innovation (MMM) program. It’s a skill he leverages every day as a program manager at Google.
The last time I went anywhere where I left the house at 9 p.m. was … a long, long time ago. That was before Friday night when, after watching my future daughter-in-law graduate Mizzou earlier in the day, she, Boy The Elder, Wifey Poo, Baby Sister-in-Law and a bunch of BTE’s friends hit downtown Columbia to go drinkin’.
This was all BTE’s idea, and when your 22-year-old kid asks you and your wife to go hang out with him on the eve of his own graduation, you go.
We hit a place called The Shot Bar first, aptly named because it features about a quadrillion different kinds of shots. I partook in something called a Duck Fart (multiple times), a Four Twenty and a Cookie Monster. By the time we left there, I was feeling quite good about life.
We walked a block or so and entered Understudy. There, BTE and his goon squad said we just had to have something called a Buzz Bomb. So we did. First, you chew on this flower thing. Then, you slam the shot. The flower is, evidently, a precursor to Novocaine, so by the time you shoot the shot your tongue/mouth isn’t exactly numb but isn’t exactly normal either.
Oh, and it also makes your salivary glands produce copious amounts of sweet-tasting spit for the next 10 minutes.
That’s where we old folks left the youngsters, who hit a few more spots before calling it a night themselves. After all, BTE’s graduation was mercilessly scheduled for 8:30 a.m. the next day. Our walk back to the car was … interesting. That hill we’d walked down to get to the bars seemed much steeper going back up with about seven shots in me.
It was amazing to be invited into that part of BTE’s world. To see him so carefree and happy, hanging out with the people who have made his life special, was amazing. His squad was made up of kids he’s known since his mid-teen years working at Chick-fil-a, his fiance, some college buds. It was so great to see him bump into people he knows from different walks of his life. Jay, the kid who’s going to be DJing his wedding (three weeks from today). A young woman from one of his food science classes.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m feeling today, waking up with a graduated alum of Mizzou instead of a student, which BTE has been since we brought him home from the hospital. Part of me is wondering exactly what I’m here for in terms of our relationship now. And part of me recognizes that not much has really changed just because he walked across a stage and picked up a diploma.
What a weekend.
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