Family, Career, Sacrifices and The Normal Life

It sems like every day it's a battle of scheduling. Between this website(including creating posts, comics and media), my 8-hour-a-dayjob, my various fiction projects, my wife and just relaxing, I try to get a bit done from every category and usually fail. On the other hand, I do manage to get some things done, which is nice.

Notice how in the above list of things I didn't mention family. I'm of the mind that life is very short and that if I want to die happy I need to get everything I KNOW I want to do, preferably, as soon as possible. This isn't to say I constantly am working toward one goal or another--well, actually, it does.

As a result my family is often finding themselves annoyed with me. I put plenty of other things in front of seeing family almost every time someone wanted to see me. My niece was born last spring on the east coast and I haven't seen her in the flesh yet. I didn't make my grandmother's funeral because I was shooting a short film that day. I was the director and it had taken a bit of doing to get a day when all the actors could be there together with the crew (always a challenge when you have no budget).

In short, I make a lot of sacrifices for what I want to do with my life. My family, as families are known to do, tend to inadvertantly use guilt to try to manipulating me into sacrificing the most important stuff in my life just so I can have a meal or spend some quality time with them.

During said quality time I find myself lukcy to be asked about my passions. This past weekend my father and step-mother were in town to see TheWife and I (though they flew into also see my step-sister an hour east of us and my ex-step-brother, his wife and their daughter)--so it's not about just seeing me). They planned to spend all day Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night with us. Of course, they didn't bother to ask us if we had that much time to spare. So, we told them"sorry" and only spent last evening with them.

They still tried to get us to change our plans and while it didn't descend into a shouting match, I wonder how long it will be before they start treating me like the adult I've been treating them like for my entire life.

How many childhood birthdays did my various parents (I have 4) miss because of business trips, late office meetings and bad traffic?

It's no wonder I really hate celebrating my birthday. Growing up I always felt like I came in a close second to my parents career choices. Now it's my turn to make the career choices over family and they don't get it despite the fact that I've learned these values from them.

Kind of amusing when you think about it.

I suppose the good news is that they are catching on. There's still the familial guilt and overt disappointment, but they seem togive up on swaying me much sooner than they used to. I don't know if it's conscious on their part or not, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

I know my mom is the only of the 4 parents I have who actually bothers to read my blog, so let's hope I didn't just give her a reason to never read it again. :)

Sorry, just need to muse/vent a bit this morning.

Stay tuned for the Project365 picture for today and more of my quips to the State of the Empire speech as well. I'l have part 7 up by 2pm PT.

So much more to blog on, too...

Crap, I wanted to mention about how Saturday night was the first time in a month that we've actually hung out with friends. I hardly see any of my friends. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying. The only time I usually see friends is if we're working on some project.

I wonder if my family understands that it's not just them I can't make time for. Ah well...