Tonight is an MKP meeting. I’m not attending.

I’m home, writing this.

Why? I’m exhausted and don't have the energy to go.

Two weeks ago I went on vacation, and it turned out to be one of the best times I’ve ever had. A solid week of perfect summer days, each one a gem of lost time and little thought except to appreciate the simple things: family, friends, life. 

Like last year, it was not only good to get away from work and the daily schedule, it was good to get away from myself, step out of the mental box and look around. It was good to get away from this site, and the whole man thing.

Returning, I come back to find work piled up, new deadlines and new worries.

This week I arrive at the office to find a lightning strike has zapped the electronics, bringing work to a grinding halt as we now must scramble to get a horde of service people to patch us together; we only had phone service restored yesterday, and I still cannot print to a copier. My days have been running around in the heat doing fieldwork because of this office mess, and working twice as hard to play catch-up to a schedule already behind.

So I missed tonight's MKP meeting. The quest for a better man, I have discovered, must take a back seat as I focus on my real work, the stuff I get paid to do.

But before I retire my “pen”, I have a few thoughts to put down regarding my thoughts from vacation.

I read the blog I wrote last year when I got back, not the waterfall story, but one on a the importance of simply letting myself Be. The same thoughts have surfaced again this time; I go about torturing myself for not being like other men, feeling so alien and alone.

I realize I am the unique result of a lifetime of experiences, with a personality set by genetics and nurture. It is useless to agonize over not being what I am simply not. I’m Me, and I need to continue to get know and accept myself a bit more, so I can learn to respect, and maybe even come to like the man I see in the mirror.

Only then will true manliness come. No one is going to help me with this, it is something I must do on my own.

Be who you are, and be that well. -St Francis De Sales