My six-month old puts his head down for a nap; it’s one of the two he takes during the day. When his eyes close, I jump all over the house trying to get things done.
A part of me wonders if I will ever be a productive member of society again. Once a master of organization, now I try to content myself with getting all the bottles washed before he wakes back up. In those odd moments when I have time, I spend most of it trying to decide what to do with it. Watch television? Read? Edit? Work on my novel? Take a nap myself? Eat every unhealthy thing in the house? Tackle one of the countless chores needing to be done?
Or perhaps I could make a blog post.
I never really understood the value of time until I didn’t have any. If fatherhood is teaching me anything (outside of patience, diaper skills, and baby fingernail trimming), it is to focus on doing one or two things well, because there isn’t enough time for the renaissance man jack-of-all-trades nonsense anymore.
Roughly a year later…
One of the main reasons I started this blog was so it could serve as a time capsule for me. A lot has changed in the year or so since this post was initially generated. For one, Thor is running all over the place and causing mayhem. Indeed, Past Corey had no concept of how little time he would have.
The irony of the original post doesn’t elude me. Past Corey believed he was taxed for time. With Thor napping only once during the day now, and my amazing wife consistently being away on a warship, time truly has become a precious quantity. Here’s my takeaways:
- Be willing to tell people “no.” When time becomes a premium, then you have to learn to say no more often, even if it’s a project/job/task you think is awesome.
- Don’t stress about the small stuff. And man, it took my a while to figure out what the small stuff was. Figure out what you can control and focus on that. You must tend to your garden of f***s and not give them too freely.
- When it’s time to work, play, or chill, don’t get sidetracked. In a world where multitasking is listed on resumes, I strive to do the opposite. Multitasking usually means I’m half-assing something. As Ron Swanson would say, “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
These lessons are about as deep as a puddle in the desert, but heck, I never claimed to be a philosophizer. I’m just a dad trying to sort through the madness one day at a time. That’s it for my blog time; I’ll update this post in another year.
The drive from South Carolina to Kentucky usually takes us about eight hours. In the first five hours of travel time, we had barely moved. I wasn’t upset about this. I was happy people had the sense to evacuate. All told, it took us twelve hours to get to Georgetown (my mother-in-law lives there).
I know it’s Wasteland Wednesday, but I wanted to take a day to share what I’m into these days. I haven’t taken a day to talk about life for a while and Wednesday is as good a day as any. Perhaps, in addition to wasteland updates, I will start offering some author/editor updates on Wednesday too. As always, I’m tweaking this page as I go.
I‘ve also just recently started collaborating with the 
With all this being said, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who find the time to stop by my page and give it a read. I really love when we get to exchange some comments, and I’m always learning from all of you.
November 23rd of 2015 is the day my life shifted into a new (and frightening) gear. My son Thor Alexander Truax was born. I knew this new addition would change my life, but I wasn’t entirely sure just what this meant.
It was a few weeks before the moment came. Thor was crying, I was trying everything I could to calm him down, and nothing was working. I put him down on the bed in his tiny swaddle and just stepped back. I was absolutely defeated. He just continued bawling. Then for a few seconds he stopped. He blinked his little mole eyes and squinted toward me. Then it happened. The moment.
The first origins story comes to us from December 6, 1907. Location – Monongah, West Virginia. Circumstance – “the worst mining disaster in American History.” An explosion rocked a coal mine killing 361 of the 367 men working within. Of the fallen, 250 were fathers. This left approximately 1000 children fatherless. A thousand fatherless children. I read it twice, I’m writing it twice. The following year the Williams Memorial Methodist
Dodd came back to Spokane in the 1930s, started cracking clergy skulls, and pushed Father’s Day into the national spotlight. Much of the nation discounted the holiday as a cheap trick to create a commercial holiday and sell stuff. Help came in the form of the Father’s Day Council, which was headed up by various men’s retailers. They ran advertisements in major publications to push the idea of this holiday, hocking their various wares as well. If mom gets flowers on her day, dad should get a nice new tobacco pipe on his!
Ultimately, from 1913 to 1972 multiple politicians and presidents attempted to turn Father’s Day into an actual federal holiday. Every time there was resistance from Congress. They feared it would become a commercialized holiday. President Nixon, with a fist of fatherly love, signed it into law in 1971. He may have been a lot of things, but Tricky Dick obviously loved his father.
Corey Truax 