I heard some very bad
I heard some very bad news today and it made me realize something somewhat depressing.
This morning, while starting his workday with my mom, my dad suffered a stroke. He was driving at the time, and rammed their worktruck into a pole. My mom is fine and I suppose their truck will be ok, but my dad's left side is paralyzed and he's currently in ICU, set to undergo surgery later today. I'm grief-stricken over that (and what effect this will have on them, as they ran their own business, entirely by themselves), though Kay says a right brain injury is better than a left one as his speech will have a better chance of remaining intact.
I also realized today that since I'm unemployed, I don't have any coworkers to share the news with. I talked it over with Kay and that helped, but it sucks to not be at a job where I would normally be surrounded with four or five close friends. I realize that I always took it for granted that I worked at places where my coworkers could also be considered close friends: at UCLA, at Pyra, and even at KnowNow. No one else currently knows about this because I couldn't tell them, it's a bit weird to email or IM someone to say your dad had a stroke. It's also weird to say it here, and I know it may seem self-indulgent for me to turn a post about my dad's currently grave illness into a reflection on myself, but I had to get this off my chest, to say it somewhere.