My Dad asks me often about my racquetball, I guess as most parents should, but it's hard not to think there's a different agenda. A different motive for his inquiry. Because of our history, I think he's checking to see if I've given up on it yet.

When I haven't, he brings up other current and past interests I've had like: walking, poetry, flying sport kites, and even writing. I admit some interests are close to death like writing and poetry. Some have all together died like flying sport kites. He didn't mention Intervue Digest, I suppose he forgot about it or maybe, just maybe, he's accepted it.

It almost always gets under my skin and takes me a long time to forget about the little barb. My wife says, 
"Why do you let it bother you?" I don't have an answer other than I wish I had his support. Wish I could talk to him about them.

I think we all want the support of our parents and it becomes hard to share feelings of inadequacy with others even people close to us because of that lack of support. The shame is without a support system it takes a lot more effort to be successful and I find myself running out of fuel.

Most of the time, I'm spread too thin over various interests and don't have much time to dedicate to one or trying to research a problem puts the interest on the back burner.

For a few months, my sole interest has been racquetball. I've developed a website and even a database to track scores and provide some stats. I was totally obsessed with racquetball and the website development. I had dreams of running tournaments and matches and having a good pool of people to play against, but it's hard to get people to play that way. Some want no part of the web. Others play inconsistently or are even hurt. So the interest will remain it will just change.

Instead of trying to manage everything myself, I can just pay some money and play in a tournament or join another club or just challenge someone at Rutgers. I just like running things. I guess the best example was running Dungeons and Dragons as a DM--another dead interest.

So starting to feel a desire to work on Intervue Digest and my game programming again. Just need to finish integrating racquetball into my life. It also helps to open up to my wife about what I want and she's been a great boost to my support system. Even though, racquetball wasn't her favorite subject for a while.

Thanks for reading,
Joe Delgado