Introduction
July, August, and September did not go down as very memorable months, at least not in any good way. I was still dealing with occasional pain in my sides, there was constant worry about the health of my grandmother on my mom's side, and I seemed to manage to screw up the one good opportunity I had with a girl.
In scouring the entries I wrote during that period of time, I made every attempt to find something good worth remembering, but, outside of the way the Indians were playing, there wasn't really anything good to mention.
I spent a lot of time trying to analyze what I was doing when it came to dealing with girls and really learned absolutely nothing from the experiences I was having. If anything, I seemed to be unable to find myself content with one single girl, yet I managed to get attached somehow anyway.
There are also occasional rumblings of a stressful work environment, but I didn't get into much except when I was going off on Keith, something that has been a constant since he arrived on the scene.
July
In the beginning of the month, I was still feeling like things with Molly could only get better, that it was just a matter of us finding some serious common ground. The thing that had become clear was that we rarely had anything to talk about and to this day, I'm still not sure what the exact problem was. I could never quite tell if she was just tired when we talked or if there was some other issue she had with me.
The kidney stone ordeal continued to bother me a little, causing me sporadic pain, although now I wonder if it was just something else and not a kidney stone as the doctors led me to believe. My follow-up would net no new information and even raised doubts about whether or not it was indeed a stone.
I was trying to enjoy the baseball season as best I could, although the continued worry over Molly was wearing on me, as was work. It seemed that things were getting worse and worse by the moment as people became increasingly stressed by one another and the job.
Family life was going okay as we continued to adjust to having a baby in the house, one that was much smarter than he should be and developing at an extraordinary pace.
The main thing on my mind was clear though. Molly dominated my thoughts, but as the month wore on, I became increasingly frustrated with things and by the time the end of July rolled around, we weren't really even talking anymore. By this point, I had all but given up hope for her and was trying to move on.
The month culminated in the meeting of Jessica, someone who at the time was going to cure all the things that ailed me. Initially, I was ready to embrace someone who was just going to embrace me, but it was a venture doomed from the start.
I wasn't ready to be with someone I really didn't know, but I jumped in anyway thinking I was. This ended up backfiring on me as Jessica was almost impossible to get a hold of, except when she was online at night. She rarely returned phone calls and seemed to expect more from me than I was possibly ready to give.
This wouldn't become clear until later on though.
August
Early in August, I was still infatuated with Jessica and trying to be patient with her as she endured personal problems, but it was beginning to wear on me the fact that I could never get her on the phone. She almost seemed intent on talking to me just online, something that was beginning to bother me more and more.
This was the month during the year that Indians made the run at the Twins in the division. It was exciting to be a baseball fan again, and even if it was only for that month, it was great to see crowds fill up Jacobs Field again. It was so intense that in one series against the Twins, there were three consecutive sellouts as the Indians closed to within a game of the Twins before fading.
That month, my mom and I made our regular pilgrimage to Cedar Point and as always, had a great time riding the rides. We managed to get on all the ones we wanted to, and that of course included the Millenium Force. It was a great way for both of us to break up what had been a lackluster summer.
September
September was a weird month. I was supposed to have been back in school, but issues with Tri-C forced me to change those plans as I ran into one obstacle after another. I eventually realized I wasn't going to have time to clear up all the problems and I decided that I was going to have to wait.
One night during this month convinced me that I had to forget and move on from Jessica as best I could even though I had already made a mess of things. At one point, I was having messages on AIM forwarded to my cell phone, but that tended to raise confusion. Jessica one night thought I was on when I wasn't and continued to send message after message rather than just pick up her phone and call me. In the meantime, I was out and didn't realize I was getting messages because of how noisy it was where we were.
The discovery of several text messages and no phone calls irritated me and spelled the end of what shouldn't have been to begin with. In the end, I realized I was probably best suited to just go out, have fun, and actually get to know someone before making a committment.
This was the beginning of the great Lisa/Liz debate within me as well, something that concerned two different girls I was talking to at the time. As much as I shouldn't think this, I probably made the right choice in who I talked to. Lisa ended up becoming someone I could just call and talk to while Liz and I never really clicked in any way at all.
The baseball season was winding down and I was just hoping for the Indians to finish strong, something they ended up doing to finish 80-82, a vast improvement over the previous year. It was almost time to look at basketball again, something that I wasn't yet excited over, but it would soon change once the team got out on the court.
The biggest concern at this time was my grandmother's health. No one was sure if she was going to make it through the end of the year and it didn't seem good at all.
Overall Analysis
The summer of 2004 would turn out to be one of the most forgettable I had had in many years. I didn't do much of what I set out to do, failing miserably in some cases. I allowed situations to dictate how I acted, rather than be the one dictating the results. I fell into situations I wasn't comfortable in and couldn't find a way to rectify things.
The girl trouble is the thing that bothers me the most still. To this day, I still feel like if I had just been comfortable with Molly, I would've been fine, but I never allowed that to happen and it just was not meant to be. The mess with Jessica is even more unexcusable, but something I have to live with.
Basically, it was a summer to forget in a year to forget.
The entries for this period of time can be found in January/July 2004 and Summer/Fall 2004.