Joe Stephens's Blog

As I look out the doors to my left, the sun is shining. It's supposed to get up to 48 today. And tomorrow, we could possibly have snowmageddon. Or not. Could be rain. Or not. But later this week, we can expect to get into the single digits. And probably by the end of the week, it will be spring-like. It's enough to make you want to go to bed until April.I know, I know--the weather is always variable in places without palm trees lining the roads. But March is, in my opinion (along with a lot of other folks), the cruelest month. It's a tease. You think it's spring, and eventually it is. But at the beginning, it's a pre-teen. Warm and bubbly one minute. All's right with the world. And then, five minutes later, it hates you and storms around like a banshee. Five minutes after that, it's silent but as cold as the depths of space. And finally, all seems well again. Even still, it is a month of great hope. We know winter is, despite its protestations, on its way out thedoor. We know spring, complete with longer days, evenings warm enough to enjoy sitting in the backyard with a small fire, flowers, budding trees, planting seeds for our summer vegetable gardens, and maybe even the ability for normal people (not the wacko guys you see wearing them through blizzards) to break out the shorts, is just a short way up the road. All we need is a little patience. And realism. Yes, there will be warm days, but it's way too early to put away those coats. And snow shovels. But make sure you know where your shorts are too. Like the aforementioned preteen, March is trying to figure out who it is. Is it winter? Is it spring? Is it cold? Is it warm? Is it blustery? Is it calm? The answer to all those questions is yes.So, in that way, March is an awful lot like not just tweens, but humans in general. I find I'm all those things too. As someone who is on the back side of 50, the swings tend to be smaller, but Sarah and Lauren can tell you they're still there. And I've also learned the ability to hide the worst of the tempestuousness away from the outside world. Sarah, being my honest-to-goodness soulmate, is never fooled, though. Almost from the time we met, she could read my mood with one look, even when I thought I was hiding it well. At first, it was a little disconcerting, but now it's a comfort to know I can't hide my anger or sadness or frustrations from her, so I may as well not even try. I can be all me in front of her. And even on the rare occasion when my negative emotions are aimed toward her, she takes them in and doesn't lash out in response. She just loves me through it. I honestly don't know what I did to get so blessed, but I'm glad God brought her to me.

During the time I was highly productive as a writer, I was essentially a free agent. Other than work, I had nothing that demanded my time. I could write in the evenings, on weekends, and much of the summer. That was a good thing, as long as you discount the whole I-was-lonely-and-sad part. Well to be more accurate, I was sad first and then lonely later, though I definitely didn't admit that, even to myself. It was only after I met Sarah and my heart felt what it was to not be lonely that I realized how achingly alone I had felt for many years. But I sure did do some good writing. It could be that lonely and sad are perfect conditions for productivity. So I had a prolific writing career, but a woefully incomplete personal life. And then something magical happened. This angel walked into my life. All those sad and lonely days went away, almost literally overnight. And it was at this point when my writing life went from 60 to 0 like I'd just passed a state trooper. I was in that place in life where every waking moment and every waking (and even many sleeping) thought was of this woman who has brought such joy and fulfillment into my life. I'm sure it was in large part because my priority was creating a new life with the people who would eventually become my wife and stepdaughter, but I wondered how much of my lack of interest in writing had to do with the fact that I was just too darn happy. After all, I'm always reading that artists need to be tortured souls. And boy howdy, am I ever not tortured. So now here I am, almost eight months into my honeymoon. Sarah (and Lauren) and I are settling into our new normal. I still closely guard my time with my beloved bride, but I'm somehow beginning to carve out small niches of time to actually write. I'm blogging on a semi-regular basis, though my old pattern of Saturday mornings is simply not good. If we're not busy doing something, hopefully together, we're busy not being busy together. The last thing I want to do on the one morning Sarah doesn't have to get up to go to work is sit clacking away on my keyboard. I'm also actually making slow but steady progress on the novel. It's not like before where I would go to Panera and write for six or seven hours. Abig adjustment I'm making is learning to write in short concentrated bursts rather than dedicating hours at a time to it. Maybe I won't have days of 5000 words or more like I used to. But if I can string together some 5000-word weeks, I'll have a rough draft in a few months. And that is fine with me. So maybe I don't need to be a tortured soul to be a writer. Now, whether I have to be a tortured soul in order to be any darn good, well, that's up to readers to decide.

I'm one of those people. The ones who keep track of things I've accomplished. Love having a list and being able to mark stuff off them. It's a way of maintaining an illusion of control over my world. Or at least some tiny little part of it. I have to-do lists, both short- and long-term. I have grocery lists and separate lists for shopping items that aren't groceries. I keep them in my notes app on my phone. The problem is, since it's electronic, I never have the true satisfaction of wadding up the list and throwing it away (in the recycle bin, of course) when it's complete. But it's never really complete. I was shocked to find when I started shopping for my own groceries that after I bought food or soap or trash bags or whatever, I was eventually going to have to buy more. But I still love that feeling when I can delete everything off my list. At least until I get home and Sarah says we're out of cat food. Stupid cats and their eating. Something else I love to keep track of is milestones. I've been a reader for the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition exam for several years. If you were able to sneak past security into the reading room and look over my shoulder at the little notes page I keep for various reasons, such as things to remember to tell my kids when school starts again or story ideas or things I want to remember to tell Sarah when we talk, you'll notice a little collection of slashes in the upper left corner. That's where I keep track of essays I've read. Each slash stands for a folder of 25 books, each one containing (in theory) three essays. I only read one of them. So four slashes stands for 100 essays I've scored. At the beginning of each reading, I have the goal of 1500 essays over the seven-day reading. I've made it every year but one. My first year, when I was desperate to prove my worth to my table leader, I scored 1900 essays. I've since found there are superhuman people who read can read between 300 and 400 essays per day. Per day. How is that possible? I have no idea. But I'm told 1500 is quite respectable. As a writer, my milestones are word counts. You might think pages, but that doesn't work. Pages aren't universal. They depend on the size of the book and font size and spacing and margins and about eleventy billion other things. A book that's 200 pages in one format may be 350 in another. But words are words are words. Words don't lie. They don't exaggerate. You can't change the font and make 50,000 words into 60,000. Do they matter in any real sense? Not even a little bit. The actual goal is to write a book that tells the whole story you want to tell exactly the way you want to tell it. Some of the best stories I've ever read were less than 20,000 words, and a couple of the ones I regret the most are of the doorstop (hundreds of thousands of words) variety. But they matter. How? The same way miles mattered when I was a runner. Mostly I ran to be in shape and keep myself young. So did it matter exactly how far I ran? No, but would I stop at 2.87 miles? NEVER! I was going to push it to that next nice, round number. Same with writing. I'm always pushing past that next thousand-word mark or, even better, ten-thousand word mark. For instance, in my latest manuscript, I just earlier today eclipsed 80,000 words. I'm looking forward with giddy anticipation to reaching a milestone I've never reached in any one single book--the mythic 100,000 word mark. Who knows? After that I may just abandon all sanity and crash through 150k. I'm no George R. R. Martin or JRR Tolkien or J. K. Rowling or any of those two-or-more-initials-in-their-names kind of writers, so I can't imagine ever hitting that stratospheric level of 200,000, much less a quarter million. But one can dream.Why does this matter? It may seem silly, but it's one of the things that keep me going. That next milestone. Is it getting a cool story down that pushes me? By all means. But it's a long, long way between when I get that first idea and when I get the whole thing written. I need those little interim markers to shoot for. Scenes and chapters and events and, yes, even word counts. Am I unusual? Maybe, but something tells me I'm not. Any other writers out there? What say you?

Outside the French doors in our bedroom, the last of the night's storm flutters lazily from the sky onto the white blanket covering everything in sight. It was forty-five degrees when we went to bed and twenty-one when I woke up. Quite a shock to the system. But it is undeniably beautiful. And it has the added bonus of giving us an excuse to stay indoors (except for taking the puppy out) for at least the first half of the day. And, as is my wont, I like to use unexpected free time in one or both of two pastimes--reading and writing. I'll do some reading in a bit.As this is an author site, I thought I should actually mention writing once in a while. So, for those of you who have followed my work, I want to let you know what's going on for writer Joe instead of husband Joe this time. And, while it may not appear anything is going on, I can assure you nothing could be further from the truth. Writing is going on and I stand by my goal of finishing my work-in-progress by the end of 2019. I have also taken to writing sonnets lately. They are of an intensely personal nature and I doubt anyone other than Sarah will ever read them, but I've found writing them to be quite a positive experience. I'm certainly no Billy Collins, but I find great joy in trying to take an event or a concept and boil it down to its essence to the point that I can convey it in a mere 140 syllables. That, along with the rhyming restrictions, makes it as much a mental puzzle as an emotional reflection.I'm writing exclusively in Shakespearean format. I just don't know what Petrarch was thinking with his rhyme scheme. I can't come up with that many of the same rhyming sounds. And what I'm writing about lends itself more to the Elizabethan form, in which I introduce the topic in the first quatrain, develop or respond in the second, and conclude in the third, with some level of summary in the final couplet rather than the point-counterpoint setup of the Italian form. But that may be more information than you are interested in. Sorry for slipping into teacher mode for a moment, there. Getting back to my current attempt at a novel, I am also making some slow progress on it. I look forward to tomorrow, which is a school holiday, as my plan for the day is mostly to bang away on my keyboard all day. In case you've forgotten or are new to my site, this is not another in my Shalan series. It is a straight work of literary fiction set in the coal fields of WV. It's not about coal mining, though. It's primarily about a young woman who is raised by her single mom. The central conflict comes from the mother refusing to tell the daughter who her father is. My plan is to seek representation and traditional publication for this one. I will, of course, keep you updated on my progress in the writing and the agent hunt. I'm also still contributing to ClutchMOV. My review of the Actors Guild of Parkersburg's Aladdin, Jr. is featured right now. I am limited, for the most part, to play reviews at the moment, but who knows? Maybe I'll be able to work in more from time to time. So that's what's going on in writer Joe's life. Hope you enjoyed catching up. I know I did. Stay safe out there and God bless!

I am writing this from a chair beside my mother's hospital bed. Since it's the weekend, I get to spend the night with her. I don't sleep well under the best of circumstances, and these aren't the best of circumstances. So it might be a long night. So I might as well get some writing done, right? I hope the final product actually makes sense. I guess you can let me know how I did. As you may know, I've been writing a series on my priorities and goals for 2019. The previous two posts were about my faith and personal life. This entry is about my professional goals. For me, goals fall into two areas: teaching and writing. I have one major goal in each area, as well as minor ones. As far as teaching goes, my main goal is one that I can't really do anything more toward achieving. I've done all I can do and it's just a matter of waiting around to see if I made it. I've applied to be an Advanced Placement consultant. That's College Board's way of saying trainer. I've been an AP teacher for about eighteen years and have been a reader for six, so I thought I could share some of my experience and knowledge with newer teachers. It seems like something I would enjoy and it might even mean a little extra money. Who minds extra money? But mainly, I think I could be of use and enjoy myself at the same time. A lesser goal is to be a table leader at the AP reading, which will take place in Salt Lake City in June. I have been a reader several times and my table leader from last year recommended me, so I'm hopeful. But even if I don't get to be a table leader, I look forward to going to Utah for the first time ever. The other half of my "professional" life is writing. I put that in quotation marks because I've never really made enough money at writing to call it an actual job. But it's definitely something I aspire to. And toward that end, my goal for 2019 is to finish my current work-in-progress. It's a complete departure from the books I've written before and I would love to complete it, if for no other reason than I just have this story in me I want to get out. And, in all humility, I feel like it has potential to actually be something I could use to get an agent. I will definitely keep you informed as I make progress.Secondary to that is my goal of getting back to doing this blog justice. I plan to post at least once aweek. With this series, I've gotten off to a good start. So, if you enjoy following my blog, I guess that's good news. Let me throw in that I have a tertiary goal of starting a new Shalan novel. I am really missing Harry and Dee and need to get back to them. I'm hoping 2020 is the year they finally make a new appearance in public. So those are my goals for 2019. I would love to hear from you about yours. If you're a regular reader of mine, thanks for following me over the years. If you're new, I hope you'll stick with me. God bless and have a wonderful 2019!

As I sit at my desk, coffee by my side, I contemplate my middle-age spread and the achiness I feel in my neck and shoulders and back and...oy, I'm old. But isn't old a state of mind? Isn't age just a number? Tell my hip that when it wakes me up because I've been sleeping on my left side too long. At that point, if age is truly just a number, it's an 8, because that's how I'd rate the pain that keeps me from spooning my gorgeous wife as long as I'd like. But the sad fact is I'm contributing to my feeling as physically old as I do. I'm just not taking care of myself the way I should. If my body is a temple, as the Bible says, then my temple is in some pretty severe disrepair. Like a temple on Alderaan disrepair. If you don't know what that means, ask a Star Wars fan. There are some things I can do to increase my sense of well-being. Not all are physical, but I'll start there. My first personal priority for 2019 is to repair the temple. The holidays are really good at wrecking healthy habits. I ate badly enough in the last couple months that I actually got sick. I don't think I had a bug. I think my body just rebelled. My goal is to stop tearing myself down and instead use food and activity to build myself up. Some specific, attainable goals to help with that are: Lose enough weight to get back into my wedding pants. I've gained 13 pounds since the wedding and I just can't snap them. No sick days because I've eaten too poorly. I have no intention of depriving myself, but I will think of treats as treats and not an everyday occurrence. Part and parcel with that is eating at home more, which will help save money too.Be ready to at least walk in the Parkersburg Half Marathon in August. My old, creaky knees may not let me run in it, but I intend to participate in it this year. In order to do that, I need to start walking and lifting weights IMMEDIATELY. If I can meet these three goals, I will feel so much better. But my sense of well being is not just tied to the physical. There are also mind and spirit. And I have goals for those as well. First, my plan is to worry less about what other people think about me and more about what I believe to be right and right for me. I am going to stand up proudly for who I am and what I enjoy and what I believe. If people don't like me for that, so be it. God likes me and the people in my life whose opinions matter to me like me and that's enough. Finally, my goal is to love more. Love who? Everybody. What do I mean love more? I mean to love my family and friends and everyone better, more genuinely, and more wholeheartedly. Without reservation, without regard for myself. That doesn't mean I don't care about myself. It just means I don't really think about myself when it comes to whether to do something for my loved ones. I don't put their needs first. I only consider their needs. The beauty of that is I know Sarah is the same way. She is about meeting my needs and serving me. So when I serve her while she's serving me, we're both getting our needs met. And we together meet the needs of Lauren, both directly by loving on her and teaching her right from wrong, but also by demonstrating to her what a healthy, loving, Christ-centered marriage relationship looks like. It's a win-win-win situation. Those are my personal goals for the year. I hope you get some use from them. Coming up next: professional priorities. In case you're wondering, when I say professional, I mean both teaching and writing.

I remember as a pre-teen staying up nearly all night watching channel 13's extended Chiller Theater on New Year's Eve. My cousins and brother and I would watch movies starting after the 11 o'clock news and ending with the end of the last movie at about 6am. Looking back, those movies I found so terrifying were pretty tame compared to the gory, graphic garbage that passes for horror movies nowadays. Give me suspense and leaving the scary parts to the imagination any day over a blood bath. But I digress. At this point in our life, Sarah and I were happy to stay up long enough to see the ball drop. I actually did. She sort of did. She claimed to be awake as we watched Frazier, but her quiet, adorable snores told a different story. After a quick visit with miss Lauren to exchange Happy-New-Years, we were off to slumberland. Priorities change as we age. What once seemed unthinkable, like going to bed before midnight on NYE, seems like a consummation devoutly to be wished. And things that seemed downright boring once upon a time now move to the forefront. Things like, well, having actual priorities. When I was younger, I didn't really consciously think about my priorities. I guess I had them, but they were things like having fun and staying up late and sleeping late and girls. Immediate gratification. If it took work, it wasn't worth it. I can't even fully describe how much my views have changed. Sure, I still like to have fun. And being married to my wife is about the most fun thing I've ever had the pleasure of doing. But the idea of being about me and about immediate gratification has changed pretty drastically. That has a lot to do with Sarah and Lauren. Having a wife and child who are depending on you changes your outlook. But I strongly believe God did a work in me to make me more selfless and have more of a servant's heart in order to prepare me for Sarah and Lauren too. I needed a lot of the me beaten out of me before I could be anything approaching the man these two amazing women need, and I definitely got that. But I also needed some pretty fantastic friends who loved me back to a point that I could be ready to be the final piece of the puzzle for them. And I had plenty of those, too. So now that I'm in the midst of this still-new and beautiful normal, I am ready to consciously contemplate my priorities for 2019. They fall into three areas: faith, family, and professional. And that order is significant. Because this post is already pretty darn long, my plan is to talk today about faith and follow up over the next few days with posts about my personal and professional priorities. My faith, more specifically my relationship with Christ, is not something I take lightly. I endeavor to live in such a way that it informs all other areas of my life, personal and professional. My priority this year is to become more Christlike. I obviously can't quantify this. Not sure how I would determine I had successfully become 25% more like Christ at the end of the year. But there are definitely concrete ways I can grow in my relationship with God and therefore become more like my admittedly impossible-to-match model. First, I intend to study my Bible every single day this year. Not just read it, but study it. Take notes, ask questions, seek out the opinions of trusted resources as to how to apply what I learn in my life. After all, simply laying my eyes on the words and sentences and not gaining any real benefit is a complete waste of time. Second, my goal is to improve my prayer life. That has already happened to a great extent because of my beloved wife. Every night, before we go to sleep, we read a devotion together and I* lead us in prayer. To those of you who are married, I highly recommend this. First, it means we're going to bed together, something that means more than you may think in terms of marital bliss. Second, ending our day together with prayer just puts everything else in perspective. Whether we've seen each other a lot or just a little, whether we've gotten along perfectly or had a disagreement, whether we're both happy or one or both of us is troubled by something, we clear our hearts and minds of all that by bringing everything, including each other, to God. But my own personal prayer life is spotty at best. So to improve it, I will keep a prayer journal starting today. Written prayers prevent my mind from, much like an eight-year-old on espresso, wandering aimlessly around at lightning speed.Finally, I want to become more conscious of my responses to people. I want others to see the love of Christ when they encounter me. Sarah has been such a blessing to me in that she has gently let me know, without judgment or anger, that I have the ability to sound angry or sarcastic when I don't mean to. So my goal this year is to become more contemplative about my response to the world. I want to reflect a more loving, gentle, welcoming demeanor to my family and friends and even strangers. I want to do this not so people will like me more, but so my loved ones won't be distressed thinking I'm angry or upset when I'm not. And I also want everyone I encounter to walk away wondering what it is that makes me so positive, not what it is that makes me so snarky. So those are my faith priorities. Coming soon: personal. *I should say I usually lead us. Sarah, being the humble soul she is, feels my prayers are "prettier" than hers, which is simply untrue. Sometimes I get the joy of listening to her pray. It's hard to put into words the joy and humble gratitude I feel when I hear this woman I love so much praying for me and Lauren.

Morning has bled into early afternoon, but I'm still in my PJ's so it counts. I'm alone with my dogs; Sarah and Lauren are on their way to Columbus so Lauren can spend her Christmas gift cards. They were kind enough to let me stay home to putter around the house and watch football. It's neat how Sarah's and my relationship has grown and changed since its beginning. When we first met and even when we first got married, we tried whenever possible to do everything together. It was even to the point where we said no to things because they meant being apart. Part of that was just a yearning to be with each other, but for me, at least, it was also a sense of insecurity. I had in the back of my head that if she was away from me too long, she might remember she liked life without me better. But now, though we try our hardest to schedule our time in a way that maximizes time together, we are becoming more comfortable with spending time separately, knowing that no matter how far apart we get physically, we are together spiritually (and electronically) and we will be together physically again soon. And I'm also becoming more comfortable with the idea that we need to have a chance to have lives of our own, including friends and hobbies that don't have to always involve each other. We are one, but one made of two individuals, not two carbon copies. And each of us has his or her own relationship with Lauren too. So it's okay--even necessary--to spend time on our own and for each of us to spend time with Lauren over and above time we spend as a whole family. Like today. The original plan was for all three of us to go together. But then I saw the schedule of college bowl games and asked that we schedule the trip so I could at least see the last game of the night. Sarah insisted it was perfectly fine to stay home and let Lauren and her have a girls' day. I was afraid she would feel like I was drifting away from her. She put my mind at ease by telling me she has no question that we're forever. Then she said something that struck me deeply. She said she knew we are a family forever because I was the piece that had been missing from their puzzle and when I came into her life, the puzzle was completed. They had had three pieces: Sarah, Lauren, and God. But the picture wasn't whole. Until I came along. That sounds egotistical, I fear, but I don't mean it to at all. I'm not special. But I was designed by my Creator to fit exactly into the puzzle that is Sarah and Lauren. They fill my gaps and I fill theirs. We make a whole family. But if any one of the pieces gets lost, the picture is incomplete again. We have to choose every single day to stay together and to keep God in the picture. And it's my favorite picture of all time, so I for one am going to do everything in my power to keep it whole.

If you know me even a little, you know I deal with anxiety from time to time. I imagine everyone does. It's not debilitating for me. I don't have anxiety attacks that keep me from functioning. But it's sometimes quite inconvenient in that my particular time to struggle with being anxious is at night when I should be snoozing, but am instead lying in bed with my mind whirling through all manner of possible (and often just plain silly) future and even past scenarios. The way it usually works is I go to sleep just fine. The main reason for that, I believe, is Sarah and I havejust spent time together talking, laughing, snuggling, reading a devotion, and praying. And I usually sleep at least four hours, but often, something will wake me before morning. It might be having to go the bathroom (thank you to my ever-shrinking bladder). Or maybe it's that I'm hot or cold or have a tickle in my throat or I've been lying on my left side too long (thank you to my calcifying joints) or some other discomfort. But at some point, my mind will sometimes bob to the surface and I'm awake. Some nights, I lie there a while thinking about nothing and, in the adorable words of my even more adorable wife, go back to sleepytown. But others, my brain engages and the anxiety kicks in. I've written in past about a book by Max Lucado entitled, Anxious For Nothing. Its teaching has helped, but I still struggled. I tried concentrating on my blessings and consciously giving my worries over to God and reading the book and reading the Bible. All those things helped, but there were still rough nights. I have this problem where I put my worries in God's hands but still keep my hands on them. It's a failing, I know. I get anxious about that too. But the other night, I found something that helps more than any of those other things. Well, I wouldn't say I discovered it so much as God led me to it. It was maybe 4:30 in the morning. I was struggling with something. Not to get too completely personal, but Sarah and I had had a disagreement. Okay, it was an argument. And I was struggling with two things. First, unkind thoughts for her were creeping into my mind. I found myself questioning her commitment to my well-being. Let me interject right here that this lack of commitment was a creation of my own mind and not anything she was actually guilty of. But at the same time, I was beating myself up pretty hard over how little grace I had shown her. As I lay there beside my beloved, wrestling with my thoughts and feelings, she rustled gently and rolled onto her left side. Something just moved me. I rolled toward her and wrapped my arm around her. She nestled into my chest and sweetly caressed my foot with hers in her sleep. I suddenly found myself praying over her. Not over our tiff. Over her. I lifted her up before God and asked that she be given an extra portion of His blessings and that I be a vessel of some of those blessings. And I thanked God for the privilege of being her husband and of helping her raise Lauren. I don't know for sure how long I prayed, but as it went on, this warmth and lightness settled over me and I found myself falling in love with this remarkable woman all over.As I said amen, as if on cue, Sarah rolled over, half awake. She said her usual I-love-you. It's invariably the first thing out of her mouth each morning. As she awoke, she could see a look on my face and asked if there was anything wrong. I told her it was just the opposite and that everything was right. She pursued it and I told her, tears streaming down my face, of how I had been led to pray over her and how it had completely melted my anxiety and drew me even closer to her. We held each other and touched and whispered and kissed for the rest of the time we had before we had to get up and face adulting once more. Not to get all didactic, but I learned a lesson from this. One that I've applied every night since. When I start grinding on all my anxieties, I roll over, squeeze Sarah tight, feel her relaxing into me, and pray for her. And for Lauren. And as I lift them up, and I quit filling my head and heart with my own silly worries, replacing them with care and concern for my darling, treasured wife and our little girl, I don't have room in me for worry. I realized that all those things I was doing before were about me. When I make it about God and Sarah and Lauren, my worries simply fall by the wayside. I know this is no new teaching. But maybe my story can make the lesson make sense in a way it hasn't before for you. I hope it does. I pray it does.

It was one of those moments. Where you aren't sick yet, but you know you're about to be. I woke up and before I could even get to the shower, I knew it was coming. The question was how bad it was going to be and how long it would last. The answers were pretty bad and not nearly as long as I was afraid it would. The bad news was Sarah, Lauren and I had lots of things to do that day. The good news was my big responsibilities were early in the day. So, despite how much I wanted to see Lauren't concert, I was in no shape to do anything but go home and get in bed. So that's what I did. And I lay there, passing between sleep and nausea, until the big wave of nausea hit. After that, I was a wet rag, but it seemed to have finally passed. I was going to live. I had plenty of work to do, but I was so lonely. Sarah and Lauren were off at Lauren's concert. It's funny how, when don't have a partner, you don't realize what you're missing. And now that I have Sarah, I'm acutely aware of just how badly I miss her when I'm not with her. Being without her made me feel worse. But then the concert ended and they eventually got home and I instantly felt better. Just her presence eased my pain. She didn't need to do anything. She just needed to be by my side. Hold my hand. Smile at me. Hug me. It was almost magical how she improved my condition. Love can do that. Especially when it's the love of an amazing woman like my Angel.