Today I was grateful for the extra hour of sleep.

Before mass I got to listen to watch the litany of the Sacred Heart (on TV) and listen to the scripture readings and to a sermon online. I am grateful for this also because we had no choir at mass and we had a fundraising presentation in lieu of the homily. The priest presented a great concept in regard to the afterlife, that of the subrational the suprarational argument. I thought the subject of belief in the afterlife was very synchronous with the book I am reading about the man dealing with his impending death.

also: Reductio ad absurdum (Latin: "reduction to the absurd") is a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd consequence.

I had to exercise a good deal of patience with my kids before church. My wife and I made a mistake by taking my youngest daughter who had a fever last night. She didn't feel well and cried a lot in the children's liturgy with my wife. When the kids were released I took my daughter out of the sanctuary and we sat in the van until mass was over. When my wife came out I asked her how things went and she said terrible. She went on to characterize the children as behaving badly every mass, I had to correct her in their defense and point out that the kids had been pretty good especially when they go with me alone. She went on to vilify the children's behavior and I found myself pointing out her short temper and inconsistent conduct with them as the cause of her problems.

As I sat in the van before she and the older kids came out, I listened to a talk by Fr. Corapi in which he quoted the parable: "Physician heal thyself", that is that one should attend at their own defects not those of others.

I am still not sure if this was self centered, or inconsiderate, or unjustifiably aroused bitterness. Or if perhaps it was appropriate for me to assert this in an effort to help our family.

My parents came to visit today. We had a great time together, my wife ran errands with my mom and I got to spend time practicing baseball with my dad and the boys in the back yard. I also got to line up my psychology assignment with my mom.

In the evening I got to go to an admissions function with the Knights of Columbus.

This Saturday morning I find myself really having to resist the injunctions that I have decreed for myself this week:
I have not been productive enough,
Our money is going too run out,
I am going to be dropped from math,
I am going to fail,
I can't do this,
My sobriety programming is lapsing,
It's all her fault.
None of these are true, they are all based on my fear instinct and I can walk through them by trusting and relying on infinite God rather than finite self.

This morning I was beginning to get resentful when my wife didn't wake up early and I had to attend to the kids. But she did get up at a fairly reasonable time and I was able to get started on an essay for the end of the semester assignment. My real problem here (again) was my own feelings not her actions. It was the "B" in the A-B-C's of resentment that was missing, it was my B-lief about the cause, not the true cause. I also got to spend some time catching up on journaling.

I have a simmering anxiety over not being able to do my review journaling again. This is the greatest gap that I have experienced in the past 7 years. I must again look to the ends, not the means, to keep my head up, while at the same time allowing the motivation to drive me to get back on track.

After lunch my wife started yelling at me for giving the kids leftover Halloween candy. She griped at me as she was passing through the living room and I was in the kitchen. I answered her in a regular voice that I was just giving them this for dessert. She went off on a rant yelling at me that they don't need dessert after every meal, it's not a candy free-for-all, they don't just get whatever they want, and several other things. She yelled at me long on hyperbole and short on communication. As I realized that she was not open to reason or calm, I simply backed away from the argument. The last thing I heard her say was that I am always concerned about them not getting fat, the implication being that I am contradicting myself. I thought about how it is reasonable to have dessert, how I never let them overeat or encourage large proportions, how she has always had problems with serving sizes, how my concern is that they get exercise (something she knows nothing about).

Here is one of those examples of how these days she has s very short fuse and a strong resolve for her demands to be met.

Last night I woke up and my wife was holding my hand. I thought today about how we don't share affection right now. I thought about the reasons why. She has always expressed to me that the initiative lies with me, that when i don't express affection to her she feels rejected and inhibited. Sometimes she holds back because she is angry but this rarely lasts and she typically recovers from anger in a way that is completely foreign to me. I on the other hand, do not recover from angry emotions quickly and even when I forgive, I still do not feel enthusiastically affectionate for a while.

In looking at the reasons for my reservation of affection, I think it is because I am shielding myself from coercion. I feel like that she has a mountain of ambitious, intricate and high demands for every aspect of all of our lives and the minute we become affectionate then she employs this to gain what she wants. This can't be good and it wasn't always this way. It seems that she regressed about the time that she started school.

There, now that I wrote about it, I have to resist it and let it go. I mustn't carry this resentment into every new day. I need to approach the moment without the baggage of the past.

Later in the day while updating my journal for Thursday I came across the following teaching about/from the encyclical Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI:
"To the Pope as to all his predecessors, marital relations are much more than a union of two people. They constitute a union of the loving couple with a loving God, in which the two persons create a new person materially, while God completes the creation by adding the soul. For this reason, Paul VI teaches in the first sentence of Humanae Vitae that the transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator."

I no longer felt inadequate for having to work at marriage, not just be happy.
I no longer felt guilty that the main love I feel for my wife is when I see my children in her.

The past few days I've got extremely tired in the afternoon and passed out really hard. I have to admit that this is troubling me. I want to be highly disciplined and energetic. Maybe my body is fighting off a virus, the kids are all sick with one staying home for the past two days. The past 3 days I have been the one to get the kids going in the morning. Come to think of it leading up to that my wife was sick and I had to carry much more of the load than usual.

This Friday morning I had a using dream that was elaborate, recurring all night, and left me with lingering feelings, not desire, but with a vivid recollection of the circumstances, thought patterns and emotions.

The dream took me back in time to when my wife and I had no kids. In this dream she was upset over my strong desire to use over my value of her. It was one of those times back them when she was trying participate and arrange things in a futile effort to get me to love her more.

I remember the way that the drugs looked, the amount, the shape, the texture and the smell. I remember that it wasn't enough and my wife and I were both frustrated with each other.

As usual in these cases I am easily able to identify some lack of action in my spiritual program that correlates with this disturbance.

I was grateful for a renewed sense of enthusiasm and direction in my studies that I received from a presentation by a department head today.

I was grateful that I am not as sick as my son who had a high fever last night and had to stay home.

I was grateful for the program I got to watch about Pope Paul VI who was Holy Father when I was a child. I was fascinated as I new almost nothing about him, or his relationship with the world, or the papacy in general until recently.

I have a lot more to be grateful for this day, thanks be to God.

Today I looked up the greek word for sobriety in an effort to find a word for sober ideology. I found several biblical references to the verb nepho and the adjective nephalios. I thought about the term nephology but that already means the study of clouds. Perhaps it is still fitting.

This morning I got a letter that had some potentially very bad news financially. I felt my mood plummet for a few brief moments. I recognized this as just a feeling brought on by my limited scope of vision. I sought to put my trust back in the scope God's vision and my fears were relieved for the moment.

Later I reread the letter and found that the news was not nearly as bad as I thought. It didn't have the current impact that i thought, it didn't place and unreasonable demand on me for the future, and it didn't mean certain harm. At this point the relief was more lasting.

I thought back to the day before when I noticed that it had grown cloudy and cold and I recognized that this made me feel depressed. I remembered that I had a choice, and that with divine help I could restore the sunny day in my heart.

This Tuesday during the day I took a walk to the neighborhood school to vote. It was bright and sunny and crisp and cool, turning warmer on the way home. I felt good for having done my civic duty and for being a good example for my kids. I felt bad for the choice that I had to make in the ballot box. In thinking back to this, my wife and I had a great discussion about it beforehand in which she helped me tremendously in thinking through the choice of whether or not to even participate in the process.

After being at home for a little while and doing some homework, I suddenly noticed it had grown very dark. We had the lights off and windows open in the nice sunny weather. As I walked outside I noticed the temperature had dropped with the cloud cover. I realized that I was having acute feelings of depression. Not serious emotional distress but just a reaction to the environment. I chose to change this, thanks be to God.

In the evening I got to go to a meeting for the first time in a long while. It was a really good meeting with just a few people at my home group. The topic was page 24-25 from the Big Book about the insanity of the alcoholic. I thought about how I had mixed feelings about my addiction back when. About how the understanding I found in AA helped me to resolve this.

Thanks be to God for this day.

It's been an exceedingly busy week. I find myself once again looking back to catch up on missed reviews. My frequency has fallen to an all time low. Sometime last week I reminded myself that it is the ends that is important not the means.

This Thursday morning I attended to an assignment from my psych of personal adjustment class that had me look at the influences on my views on sexuality. Upon reviewing them I came to the realization that the process of personal inventory and character building were the biggest influence. That after the typical influences of parents, religion, media, society, etc. that in the end it was the self examination that exerted the greatest insight.

After my class I had a scheduled meeting with the professor. She didn't have a specific agenda, it was a meeting to have a one on one conversation. It was an enjoyable talk and one particular question stayed with me after the meeting. She asked "have you always been this thoughtful?" My first reaction was to resist a prideful interpretation. I don't think she was asking "have you always been this wise?" but my ego wanted to go there. I decided that she must have meant "have you always been this aware of the thought life." I also thought that she might be asking "are you certain that you have the temperament to be a counselor?" I should have sought clarification at this point. I answered with some points from my "why I want to help people" essay, about how I have always been interested in inter and intra personal dynamics since my youth. I think the right answer should have been "I had to become conscious of the thought life for the sake of sanity and sobriety, when all else failed."

Friday night we went to the Halloween festival at my middle children's school. The kids were very cute. They were Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, and the Transformer leader, Optimus Prime and the Star Wars character, Jengo Fett. We had a great feeling as being a part of the community as a family. Our local congressman was there, there was a costume contest in which my boys entered, and there was a musical act for the kids, where they sang songs about the kids in costume. I got to see a friend who recognized me from the twelve step fellowship, an old friend from high school, a parent from baseball, a parent and child in religious costume, and the teachers of my children. The kids also made attracted and exchanged friendship based on shared interest evident in their costume choices.