Thanks all for the encouragement and especially to Reenie for the suggestion to be more personal in this blog.

I wasn't until now simply because my life is boring. It has ups and downs, but they're minor in the grand scheme of things. Along the lines of, "Kids in China don't have this" sort of comparison, I've a job, a loving family, a social life, and, overall, a sense of security in my future.

My own problems seem rather petty compared to many others.

• Spousekitty is in a wheelchair, with a bad back and the attendant chronic pain that greatly diminishes quality of life precludes most activities.
  
  
• Kitten is autistic. She's charming and polite, but it's mostly pattern and conditioning. She has no "BS detector," so I'm dreading the inevitable day that she'll be taken advantage of. All I can do is hope it's not too bad, the first few times.
  
  
• I am not comfortable with my job. The job is great, the coworkers are fantastic. I don't have to dodge daggers or play political games. I just expect to do better, and I'm not hitting my mark.
  
  Others will doubtless think that I'm setting the bar too high. Perhaps, but given where I work, I'm surrounded by extremely driven, highly intelligent, and, most importantly, very productive peers. I do measure myself against them, and I see myself coming up short.
  
  
• My social life is surface-y. I do have a friend in the area, someone I've known since high school. (Those of you who know my birthday, you do the math. I don't want to be depressed.) His family is great. He has a daughter who is a little older than Kitten, and they get along famously. The problem is, he's on the other side of town. I don't drive, and to get to his place is 75 minutes on the bus.
  
  Me myself, I have some nights out where I play games: racquetball one night a week, boardgames another. Neither will lead to friends-for-life. I'm just hoping for someone I can feel open to calling outside the game night, say to catch a movie. It's not happened so far.
  
  
• My mental life is screwy. I'll lay it out: I'm autistic (Asperger's Syndrome,) so I don't have the same innate "people sense" that others have. I can fake it by expending conscious effort when it's not in an area where it's patterned and conditioned into me.
  
  (I do have a rare and special area where it does feel natural, but that's because this are has rather formal interactions laid out. Being Aspie, this plays well to my strength.)
  
  I'm also mildly bipolar. I don't think I can fly, I just sometimes think I can program. On the lows, I'm not suicidal, I'm just more aware of how little influence I have.
  
  This is the curse of being "too smart."

So, my life is not yet a train wreck. It's not very stable. From the inside, I know how fragile it is, especially mentally.

Maybe this is why I haven't been writing about myself. Not just that my problems seem like whinging, but also because I simply don't want to look at them. Ironic, given that one of the stories I wrote had a character who said,

"Deferred troubles accrue interest."