This week topic is memories

Unable to fall asleep until past 1am. Unable to sleep past 6am. The good thing is the time spent rolling life around in my head was only 5 hours.

Normally wakefulness has enough distractions but this week the topic is memories. So many memories.

There's the chapter before school ever started. This is one of my golden ages. The world lay before me like an uncharted land of mystery. Everything was my laboratory.

And then school started. First kindergarten. When I actually showed up, it was miserable and constraining. Rules and kids who I wouldn't have normally played with. The best part of kindergarten was the almost 1km walk to get there... especially when I would lose myself in the space between. It was a fascinating land of weird tracks in the snow, frozen delights like old orange peals, and the horrifying territory of the big kids. This next chapter of education is mostly forgotten to me until we moved to the acreage in grade 9.

High school was a good chapter. The university chapter started off well. But, like on the way to kindergarten, I was a bit distractible. Overall though, I'd have to say that it was a very good chapter.

During university, my Chinese chapter started in earnest. While there were foreshadowings in elementary school and high school, the chapter started in 1983 when I started attending a Chinese church. 1983 to 1989 were the best 6 years of my life.

1989 started the dark chapter of marriage. It opened with foreshadows of doom. If it were a movie, the audience's reaction would range from uncomfortable squirming to bursts of "No! Run! Flee!" 1989 to 1994 were the darkest years. They bottomed out with the attempted suicide of my wife. The next 5 years were spent in a vain attempted to recover something in the marriage and, at the same time, building an exit. It was also a time to try to build companies.

The next chapter started in 1999 when I resigned from a corrupt Vancouver pump and dump company. Returning home, my wife demanded that I leave. There's more to the previous chapter but I'll leave that to another post. Leaving my wife was a rebirth with complications. It took 10 years to get a divorce.

Now, I am in China. A start of a new chapter, perhaps.

I am finally where I should have been 22 years ago. Will it work with the time shift? I find it so hard to be away from my kids. I would find it extremely hard to be not here. 5 hours last night of turning it around and around and around and around. It is always turning around. It is just during the day, the noise of life drown out the gears.