Imagine this was delivered via a tuxedoed gentleman, wearing white gloves, handing you this special invitation, beaming his radiant smile because he knows you have just been elevated to the next level, that your life is about to change forever, that you are being offered admission to one of the most elite leagues in the world.

Yes, you are being invited to participate in the Okapi Football League. Maybe you’ve heard of the grandeur, beauty and inspiring nature of the OFL, but never got around to joining before. Maybe this is your first awareness that such an elite league even exists. If that is the case, let me say to you from the bottom of my heart, I am terribly sorry you’ve been missing out on this incredible experience for so long.

However, I am pleased to offer you the chance to join what some have referred to as the “most fun during the football season you can have this side of The Great Wall of China!” Several players have said, “Receiving his weekly emails are worth the price of admission alone - just don’t tell him I said that because he’ll get a big head!” The OFL simultaneously requires incredible brain power and yet none at all. As another participant said, “People both brilliant and lacking in any intelligence whatsoever can be (and have been, frankly) victorious in the OFL.” What you need more than anything else in the world is luck. So I ask you, do you feel lucky? Do you, punk?

Okay, so it is probably bad form to call you a punk and ask you to give me money to play in the OFL all in the same email, but I didn’t get where I am today by always doing the smart thing, I tell you. No siree.

To play in the OFL all you need to do is register with CBS Sports ( http://jgsofl.football.sportsline.com/e - password is “okapi” without the quotes, of course) and then each week of the football season pick who will win every game and guess how many points both teams will score on Monday Night Football. That’s it. Sure sometimes knowing about football helps, but as we’ve learned the last two years, sometimes not knowing is more of a benefit (just ask the people who only pick teams because of their favorite mascots or jersey colors or cities and still win two or even three times).

• The cost to play will be $42.50 up front for the entire 17 week season – which breaks down to $2.50 a week and is due by September 5^th. I accept cash, check or through PayPal even credit cards (though with PayPal there is a small surcharge of $1.75). If you register for the pool, but don’t pay by September 5^th I’ll just remove your name. But it would be so much better – for all of us – if you joined and even got your family and friends to join.
• Whoever gets the most picks correct each week will win the weekly pot (we don’t worry about stupid lines or point spreads or crap like that in the OFL) – the total weekly winnings will be the amount of people in this year’s pool multiplied by two. Last year we had 24 people for a weekly pot of $48! Win one week and you’ve already won back the cost of admission! So get your family and friends to join as well so the pot will be even BIGGER this year!.
• There will also be a season-long winner – the person with the most correct picks for the entire season - who will win the Big Money Prize at the end. The amount of the season-long Big Money Prize will be determined by the number of people participating.  Last year it was $180. This year there will be a small second-place prize of of $45. There will be no third place prize again this year nor will there be a prize for last place to ensure a bigger pot for the winner.

There is no way to underestimate the amount of fun participating in the OFL is. Between the challenge of picking each week, how exciting football weekend becomes because each game matters, and, of course, receiving my notorious emails every week to make you laugh and wonder about my mental stability, it is four months of fun like nothing you have ever experienced before.

I hope you will accept the special offer of admission into the Okapi Football League. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me in person or via email and I’ll be happy to answer them.

Take care,
Jeremy
The Commish

P.S. To log in and register go to http://jgsofl.football.sportsline.com/e and use the password “okapi” without the quotes. You can even check out my emails from last year to see how much fun they are by looking at the Message Board.

I feel like the summer has passed me by this year and it is sad. Primarily because of my situation at work and recently because of working on the bathroom, I have taken almost no time off this summer and we haven’t been to the beach or gone camping or done much of anything fun recently together.

It is a bigger deal today because my Okapis and Gem are going to an aquarium we’ve never been to today. Normally, this is the kind of thing I do with them, but we haven’t done anything like that in months and now they are going on a play date. I’m sure it will be fun for them, and I wish I was with them instead of going to work again.

It’s hard essentially being the only person in my department, feeling like I can’t be out or be at lunch too long, someone always needing something from me. In the past, I totally would’ve taken today off to spend with my family. But there’s something about taking a day off my first week with my new raise that just doesn’t seem quite right.

But maybe I could take Sunday off. We’re not going to work on the bathroom on Saturday because it is my brother-in-law’s birthday. But Sunday we were going to work on it again. It is certainly going to last at least one more week if not two. Maybe I will talk to Gem about switching with me. Maybe I could do something fun with the Okapis on Sunday and she can help out with the bathroom. Or maybe we’ll all take the day off and go to the beach or something.

I just feel like I’m not going to regret the bathroom taking an extra week, but will regret the time I am missing with my family doing fun things together.

It’s when I am standing on the train platform, needing to dance that I know something is going on with me – especially since I spent a couple hours last night checking out music on iTunes and buying a whole bunch of new music. My emotions are building, expanding within me, the pressure rising to a crescendo, begging, demanding my body to move to release all that is coursing through me.

I think since I haven’t been writing as much, my emotions are more bottled up than usual and they need a release. If it’s not writing, it’s dancing and singing – even if it means I’m dancing and singing (lip synching) on the platform or on my walk to the station or in the subway. Getting this out is more important than how people look at me – at least that’s what I remind myself during times like these.

Since I haven’t been having too much time with my Okapis, I’ve tried to take extra time the last two nights and it has been wonderful. Jordyn has especially been commenting on how little time we’ve had together and it was good to show her that we still get time together, that the time apart is the aberration, not the reality.

But even as I write this, my mind is drifting away, staring outside as the landscape passes me by, my ability to focus not what it needs to be. The main problem is the amount of energy, of attention, of focus, of concentration my job now consumes of me. It’s not just the intensity of doing three different jobs all by myself. It is being asked to do so many things I don’t know how to do, having to overcome my own insecurities, my own ignorance to learn something and then apply that knowledge immediately to solve a problem. It has been a long time since I have felt this mentally exhausted, this mentally spent. It leaves me with so little for the rest of my life. It doesn’t help that we’re trying something new with the Okapis and I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in a couple of days. I am so exhausted that if I manage to stay awake on the train in the morning or the afternoon, I consider it a moral victory.

Of course, to get out of this, I need to hire a couple of people including writing their job descriptions, something I’ve never done before. I know what our department needs, but as with too many things in my life, I’m not sure how to make it happen. And so much mental energy used up on my day job makes it impossible to make progress with my dream of my own business of writing, workshops and seeing clients.

Basically, all I wanted to write about was how much my heart, soul and body seem to need music and yet it ended up with why I need music more now than usual. There is something I truly love when a new song comes on while I am walking and my walking tempo completely shifts to the beat of the song, as if the music is becoming a part of me and I am molding myself to it. I love that feeling.

So if you see some guy with red hair walking through Penn Station this morning as if he is one with his music, moving his hands, lip synching and maybe even sneaking in a step or two here and there, it is probably me. But please don’t stop and say “hi,” because I’ll be in a place I need to be and I don’t have much time to be there these days.

I remember when I would carry a collection of business cards in my front chest pocket. These were old business cards, cards that I would’ve thrown out except that they were awfully useful to take notes on, to takes notes about ideas I wanted to write about, things I wanted to turn into Two Okapis posts.

I remember there used to be a time when I would never miss a day posting. I remember thinking how do some people fall behind, miss several days in a row. I remember thinking that could never happen to me. I remember the joy I had writing every day. I remember looking forward to my morning train ride to write out whatever was on my mind.

It’s not like that anymore and I don’t know what happened.

Now writing Two Okapis feels like a chore. I am so tired these days I often try to use the morning train ride just to get some more sleep, to rest my mind for the big day ahead. My boss hasn’t been in the office for almost a month and I am essentially running a four-person department all by myself – doing three full-time jobs all alone. I am exhausted and drained, dealing with new things all of the time, pushing the edge of my envelope every day and just trying to hold it together until 4:55pm. I have never worked so hard on something I knew so little about, having to try and learn whatever I need to do with very little time to focus and concentrate because someone always wants something from me.

On Thursday I had what I am now calling a flashsight – a combination of a flashback from my past as well as an insight into what it was like for me as a little boy. It was devastating, scary, terribly painful and overwhelming. I started to write about it Friday but couldn’t. I finished it on Monday but then felt uncomfortable posting it. I’m trying really hard not to do things against my own will. If I’m not comfortable, then maybe I shouldn’t do it.

On the one hand, so much has been going on in my life. On the other hand, so little of it has been with my Okapis. At work I stood up for myself and put together a very strong case for why I deserve a raise and I got it. I’ve never done that before. I have been working to overcome my intimidation of my boss’s boss (who really is now my boss) and I have been making great progress. I have really been facing some serious fears and meeting them head on instead of turning and running. Am I still lost about building my business, my practice and writing, etc.? Absolutely. But I am trying to figure it out. Certainly some of it has to do with how hard I am working at work, how much of myself I am expending to do that job, that I have very little left to advance my own dreams. It’s frustrating but I feel like I need to be patient with myself.

And maybe I need to be patient with myself in terms of Two Okapis. I’m not sure why I am doing it anymore. I’m not sure how comfortable I am if someone I know or want to know found it and read some of my past. I am fine with everyone I know who is reading Two Okapis, it is if someone new found it, someone I didn’t know, but wanted to work with professionally, if they found it, that would not be very good. Should I make Two Okapis by invitation only? Would that make me feel more comfortable again? I don’t know.

But it is something I need to think about.

I miss writing when it flows from me, when I am not forcing it to happen, but it is coming from my mind and my laptop is just a tool to release the words from my brain. It hasn’t been like that for some time.

I would like it to be like that again.

“I don’t care about Daddy’s sickness. I care about Daddy!” my little girl cried out from her bedroom on Tuesday night. “I want Daddy!”

Unfortunately, Daddy had been completely knocked down by a nasty fever, hot enough to almost scald my hands as I held them against my face while I tried to sleep after I got home from work. Even 30 minutes after I woke up I could feel the heat against my hands. I don’t remember ever having a fever like that. Even though I was awake, it didn’t seem like the best night for me to put them to bed, so Gem was taking over. My Okapis weren’t too happy about it, however.

Honestly, without belittling myself in any way (I know, hard to believe), I think they were just looking for excuses to cry. They have been so exhausted lately, maybe it is the heat, maybe it’s all of the swimming and playing, who really knows, but they have been wiped out by the time I get home. Which is not too bad considering I am wiped by the time I get home these days as well. But being exhausted makes them like a kindling-laden woodlands where one little spark sets the whole thing aflame. Asking them to go to the dinner table, to eat their food, to brush their teeth, to change into their pajamas all result in crying jags from one or the other (and if we’re lucky, both).

But I do believe there was something there. Jordyn has been saying to me quite frequently, “But we’re not getting time together, Daddy.” When I told her the bathroom would take a couple more weeks to finish, she immediately responded by saying, “So we won’t see you until it is done?”

The truth is we’re not getting anywhere near enough time together. Whether it is family visiting, their being sick, my not feeling well, the bathroom demolition, other obligations, we haven’t gotten much time this summer. We’ve only been to the beach once. Only went camping once. Yet it feels like we’ve been so busy. We barely even get any Los Tres Amigos time together on Saturday mornings. It’s not the way we wanted our summer to go, but it is the way it has been. And my Okapis miss me.

And I miss them.

I was sitting in the waiting room at my allergist, waiting (appropriately) for my four injections, when a little boy started screaming…for his Daddy. I remember when Gem was breastfeeding and if a baby screamed her glands would immediately activate. I felt like that with this boy screaming. I just wanted to go over and soothe him. I imagined his Dad at work, not knowing how special he was to his own little boy. I watched his mother struggle to help him (unwilling to break the office rules by giving him food even though she thought he was hungry). I wondered what it would be like to be on the receiving end of a phone call with my Okapis screaming for me – it is hard enough to be there when they are screaming for me.

And that very night my own Okapis were screaming for me.

But it made sense for me not to put them to bed. Who knew what bug was attacking me? Why risk giving it to them? But I did get to put them to bed last night and it was lovely. Snuggling on Elijah’s bed while we read two books from the library, getting to hear from them why they enjoyed these books so much. Getting and giving hugs, reconnecting even if just for a night and I have to leave again the next morning for work.

Connecting and separating, so much of our lives these days – even on the weekends it seems.

Maybe I need to adjust our nightly ritual a little bit. Maybe I need to spend a few minutes just talking with them about their day, make each night more of a Los Tres Amigos night than just putting them to bed. At least until we get out of this crazy phase of our lives we seem to have entered.

Sunday afternoon Gem called Nana so the Okapis could talk to her. In fact, I think Gem pushed the numbers and Elijah actually talked first when Nana answered the phone. I stepped out of the room for a moment and when I came back, Elijah was still intently talking to her, answering her questions, listening to the stories she was telling him and letting her know what that reminded him of in his life.

At one point he started playing with a pillow while talking to her in that “I’m on the phone but it doesn’t require all of my concentration” way most of us have. Then he started walking around the living room, switching hands and ears with the phone and continuing to talk to her. Then Jordyn finally got her chance and “Miss, I don’t like the phone,” started chatting away with Nana. She seemed so comfortable on the phone, so relaxed. They talked long enough that I started thinking how thankful I was we have Voice Over IP so this was a free phone call.

It was one of the more amazing things I have ever seen. I was awed, dumbfounded by the leap in conversational ability both of my Okapis demonstrated.

I remembered the conversations I’ve had with them, the struggles to speak with them on the phone, so much so I asked Gem to stop putting them on the phone as it only seemed to make us all frustrated. I remembered all of the times we’ve put the phone on speaker so we could hear the other person while one of our Okapis tried to talk to the other person. With speaker phone we could help our Okapis respond and keep up their end of the “conversation.” Yesterday, Gem didn’t even have to say hi to Nana before Elijah was on the phone talking to her. It was incredible.

Watching my little boy walk around, I thought back to the way I was in high school, spending every single night on the phone for hours and hours, talking and pacing and talking and pacing. How the phone was a lifeline for me, an escape from my home life and utter isolation I felt.

I thought ahead to the future, to when they will be teenagers and will probably be talking on the phone every night (or whatever communications device we have by that time). It was a freaky feeling. Too fast. Too soon. I’m not ready for that yet.

Fortunately, I have a couple of years before then. But judging from the way they handled themselves on the phone on Sunday, I better get ready soon. How soon will it be before they are asking for their own cell phone?