Life as a Nerd

So, I can’t say that I watch Portlandia though I can say that I did hit on Fred Armisen’s wife once at a concert (Sally Timms, who is now his ex-wife not that there is any coincidence there. Actually, that is purely a coincidence.) Still, this sketch hits upon something that has been bouncing around recently which is what does it mean to be a nerd.

Now growing up I was undoubtedly a nerd. I’m not sure if I have ever left it, more like I have grown into the role and become more comfortable in my skin. I still wear glasses, not as a fashion statement but because otherwise I’m blind. As the skit states, taking off my glasses doesn’t turn me into a swan; it leaves me with a bad tendency to walk into walls. Kim correctly states that I look much better without glasses and I agree that I do but I’ve been wearing glasses for 75% of my life. I’ve been wearing glasses for just slightly less time than I have been wearing shoes. I’ve promised Kim that I would look into laser surgery and have put off and reneged and feel guilty as hell about that. But that just shows how attached someone can be to an object that has come to define you.

But I am straying from the point here. Now that there is a sense of nerds being cool it really raises the question of what being a nerd is and people who are posing. However, it isn’t that being a nerd is popular it is the fact that a lot of the aspects of being a nerd (video games, comic books, computers in general) have now become mainstream. I grew up in the Dungeons and Dragons crowd with people who memorized Tolkein; now everybody has seen the movies and reads about a boy wizard and is surprisingly attracted to stories about moody teenage vampires. This is a good thing. There is a reason why we were fans of these genres to begin with and as opposed to music I don’t feel as threatened by having others become fans. More people reading Captain America doesn’t bother me as much as knowing the people who picked on me in high school have now claimed my favorite band as their own.

What a nerd is, or at least what everyone who called me that implied, is someone with low self-esteem, who is anxious in social situations, who is smarter than average and has escaped into topics and crowds that he can relate to that does not correspond to what everyone else is doing. Basically being a nerd is not being average or typical or walking the standard path. There is a surprisingly fine line between being a nerd and being punk rock. You could make a introverted / extroverted connection or one is more making their own reality versus confronting reality but the idea behind it is the same. We don’t fit into the normal box and we are not going to force ourselves to conform to that box. People make from of what is different and what confounds them and that is why I was called a nerd. It hurt of course, but it made me who I am. I’ll take my life today over any life formed by a personality that I had to contort myself to make it work.

President for a day

So Kim and I were watching news coverage of the inauguration today and the topic of your favorite inauguration memory came up. My immediate response was “David Rice Atchinson becoming president for one day because Zachary Taylor wouldn’t take the oath on a Sunday and since James K. Polk’s term ended at noon on Sunday technically the presidency fell to the President Pro Tempre of the Senate, which was David Rice Atchnison. On his one day as president he is best known for taking a nap. Either that or Reagan’s second inaugural when it was so cold out that they had to cancel the parade for fear that the marching bands instruments would freeze to their lips.”


Somehow I always expect to then see her look at me with admiration and awe. Not so much in reality. More like the look of one just saying “Seriously, this is what you have designated brain cells towards?”

I mean, how much can one say about an inauguration where there is no transfer of power or no real change at all? While a presidential inauguration is a rare and at times important event these second term inaugurations tend to fall more in the range of the press conference announcing a contract extension for a head coach, albeit one that involves a parade and marching bands. There is a major speech, of course, but we will have the State of the Union in a few weeks and then political gridlock for months on end. Yes, maybe I have gotten that cynical about politics over the past few years.

The other news of the day is that Atari has declared bankruptcy. For people my age this inspires nostalgia of video game consoles with faux wood paneling and joysticks that consisted of a stick and a button and that was the epitome of high tech. Why the wood paneling I will never know but it was a nice touch. Now with the near realism of video games and controllers with more buttons than one has fingers it goes to show just how far we have progressed.

Of course, Atari today has nothing today with the Atari of my youth other than naming rights. Atari essentially died after the disastrous release of E.T. the video game in which you, well, that was the problem. No one has ever quite figured out what the purpose of the game actually was. The assumption was that E.T. was popular so just stick a sticker of a kid with a bike on a cartridge and it would sell millions, despite the fact that the movie would be hard pressed to turn into a game of any form. That put the company out of business and it was then sold off and rebundled and repackaged into all that was left was a logo and a backlog of Combat cartridges.

Still, Atari was the first video game platform that I ever played. I still have it as well, or at least it is stored somewhere at my parents on the hope that I will one day figure out how to attach it to a modern television set. Even losing the brand will make you feel like you are getting old. That said, everything makes me feel like I am getting old.

When to print the myth...

There are so many aspects to the Manti Te’o story that are interesting that this may soon become one of my favorite news events ever. I know that many people are sick of the story already and the fact that it really doesn’t matter but to me that is one of the fascinating parts of this whole thing.


Now I will admit that as a Notre Dame alumni I fall into a slightly different category here but there is a question as to why anybody cared in the first place. We spent months focused on the story of a football player (who we had never met) and his girlfriend (who we, as well as he, had never met) and how she tragically died of leukemia during the season. Sure there is the tragedy of someone dying young but sadly that happens every day. We don’t focus on it for months and then act appalled because the nature of the story changes. But tying it into a sports story completely changes the narrative.

We don’t typically grasp just how much of a story that we add over sports in order to create a better event. In reality all sports is a group of people in one color shirt challenge a group of people in another color shirt and eventually one side wins (or, in the case of soccer, end in a 0 - 0 tie and thus make the entire enterprise completely pointless.) As has often been said, on some level all you are doing is cheering laundry. So we create storylines and plotlines and create heroes and villains and describe long standing rivalries that typically have nothing to do with the competitors. We talk about the long standing rivalries between the Red Sox and the Yankees but do the players from Japan and the Dominican Republic really care about some games played and lopsided trades between these two teams nearly a hundred years ago?

The reason pro wrestling exists is because it allows for the creation of the drama of sports without having to worry about the fact of having random results. Instead of trying to find the plot line or resorting to the dreaded Olympic human interest story you write the story, determine the ending and then just perform it for the crowd, altering it based on the whims of the individuals who actually pay to watch pro wrestling. We scoff at wrestling while Bob Costas did the exact same thing every night in London.

So we have some right to be upset about being lied to in a story by Te’o. I still am in the camp that he was duped into thinking that she was real, decided to embellish the relationship because why let the truth get in the way of a good story and by the time he figured out that she wasn’t real the story had taken off and could not be retrieved. But we are lied to in every story about sports. We use sports to illustrate the human experience. For the allegories to work we have to tweak the game to serve the message. Manti did the exact same thing. It’s not entirely the same as being upset about the last scene of the Soprano’s but it is close.

My Life in Music Part 1 (1973): I’ve decided to start a new feature on the blog in honor of my turning forty this year. I figure that I can trace my entire life, interests and beliefs through the music that was created throughout my lifetime. So I will go year by year picking one song and artist that I feel represents at least some aspect of myself. I promise not to repeat artists and will do everything that I can to insure that I have seen each artist live in concert. That second one may be tougher, especially until I get to the mid-80s or so but I will certainly try my best.

For the start I will go back to an album that was released a month after my birth by a guy who literally lived in the next town over: John Prine with his song “Dear Abby”. This is a nice place to start given that Dear Abby just died even though I must admit I thought that she had died years ago. As a Chicagoan growing up I knew the story of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, twin sisters who wrote dueling advice columns for dueling newspapers and thus taught you that the people who provide advice are the same people who would publicly feud with each other. More importantly this song has the legendary refrain “You are who you are and you ain’t who you ain’t.” It has taken me nearly forty years to figure out who I am and who I am not. Once you get that lesson down life becomes easier. Not necessarily better but easier.

I swear I really did have a Canadian girlfriend

Well I don’t have to look too far for a topic tonight. Here are my thoughts on the Manti Te’o story and what I can make out of it.


The first big question is what Te’o the victim of a hoax or was he behind it? Obviously the first thought that many people would have is that this was a big plan that he developed in order to gain more press. Invent imaginary girlfriend, have imaginary girlfriend die early in the season, gain great press from playing in her memory and use that to improve your draft position. To me that doesn’t make any sense at all. Obviously people could check up on the story and there was no guarantee that Notre Dame was going to have this amazing season and turn Manti into a Heisman candidate. Plus, why include a fake death when his grandmother, who he was incredibly close to, died on the same day? Yes it adds to the story but it wasn’t really necessary. He was already the top prospect and a prospective first rounder on a team that is on television every week.

If Manti was involved in the creation of the imaginary girlfriend and he did it for publicity he would have to be a stone cold person. From every interview and comment that I have seen about him for four years I’ve seen no indication that there would be anything like this in his personality. I’ve never heard anyone say a negative thing about the kid. If he was involved in the setup of the hoax I would be stunned and disappointed beyond belief.

So if he was a victim of the hoax what the hell happened? After thinking about it for a few hours this is my best guess.

Manti gets a message from someone on Twitter and starts a conversation. They tweet and text regularly over time. Maybe they even talk on the phone a few times. Her backstory becomes more convoluted (car accident, cancer, bone marrow transplant) until, on the same day that the news breaks that his grandmother died the person behind the hoax also tells him that the girl has died. In talking to the team and press about it Manti describes her as “his girlfriend”, which leads to the story getting confused in the press.

See, the term girlfriend is what has always bugged me about this from the start. You notice that they never showed pictures of her with him throughout the season, or mentioned him by her bedside, or any other behaviors you would expect out of someone whose girlfriend (in the standard definition of the term) is dying. But I can easily see a guy, even a top football player, refer to someone he only talks to online as his girlfriend because, hell, I’ve been guilty of that one.

Obviously my geekiness and dating challenges are well documented on this blog, which makes the fact that Kim and I are married still the best proof that I have that miracles are still possible. But in college I referred to a girl I met every week for coffee as my girlfriend. We never dated, never even really came close to in fact, but we regularly spent time together and there is no good word for a relationship like that especially when trying to explain that to your buddies who don’t know her. She can’t be your friend because then they would know her so it is just easier to describe her as a girlfriend. I’ve written about relationships where I went on a few dates or one date or never technically been on a date but more like we happened to repeatedly find ourselves in the same bar and described them all in this blog as relationships or girlfriends. It’s a huge lie and I think everyone realizes it but it makes you feel better because as a guy you never want to admit that you can’t get a girlfriend. There is just a part of the evolutionary, lizard like portion of your brain that constantly goes “I would make an especially good mate. My sperm are healthy and plentiful” and you will invent Canadian girlfriends galore to keep that image up.

So Manti talks to a girl online and describes her to a bunch of buddies as a girlfriend. He is duped into thinking she was real and when told that she has died he calls her a girlfriend. When the press calls him out on it he doesn’t want to admit that they had never actually met and they weren’t really dating so he makes up a story about how they met and how they hung out together a few times. The story takes on its own life and once someone looks into it and finds out that she isn’t real the entire thing explodes. That version makes sense to me.

I do also want to add this, though. I want to give huge kudos to my friends at Deadspin for breaking this story and doing the leg work behind it. For those who don’t know, Deadspin was founded by Will Leitch who was a few years behind me at Illinois and if I remember correctly was on the team of Daily Illini writers who beat me in the intramural sports trivia competition my senior year (yes, sports trivia was a legitimate intramural sport at Illinois.) The fact that no one else: ESPN, Sports Illustrated, CNN, every news outlet that you can think of, did the research into this story to find out the truth just shows how great of a job Deadspin does on covering sports and just how bad the mainstream media is. I mean, how can ESPN not send someone to find the girl’s parents to talk about the relationship? How could no one else do the work to find this out? That might be as big of a story as anything else here. The story should be less on the hoax itself but how in the world could the main story of the football season, involving the Heisman runner up, be false and no one notice?

Wednesday Night Music Club: Actually these are really the New Pornographers, right? I mean, I’ve met the band…

Regaining a voice

I will admit that this return to blogging has been very uneven so far. I am still working on a writing schedule and the fact that I have taken nearly two years off from writing has resulted in my talent and creative muscles suffering greatly. It is amazing to what degree creativity really is like a muscle. Writing right now is very similar to me as those first few workouts; you are enthusiastic at first but then you are discouraged by your first effort and then you are sore in ways that you cannot recall. The main challenge is not to write something brilliant but rather it is just to write. I have to sit down day after day and put words to paper and eventually something will happen, much like hitting the treadmill day after day until the pounds begin to fall off.


What I find now as opposed to when I started this blog in 2004 and certainly compared to when I was a teenager or in college is that I no longer assume that what I write is brilliant. I truly thought as a teenager that I was on the verge of writing the Great American Novel or penning some brilliant satire. I’ve looked back at those stories and those first twenty pages of numerous novels that I tried to write and have realized that they were horrible. Just embarrassingly bad with no form, structure or hope at all. There was talent there and I can see my humor working at times but it is so immature. But that is one of those wonderful blessings of youth, you think you are good so you work hard and do a lot of crap work until one day you slowly start to improve.

While I may never be brilliant I do think that when I was blogging regularly I did have a run where I was writing something that was interesting and even though I have the talent it has really hit me that I can’t return to that spot because my voice has completely changed. If you think about it the blog really captures my early 30’s when I seemingly spent my nights in bars, listening to bands, playing trivia and having a series of relationships fail in more and more ridiculous ways. The posts capture the thoughts of someone who still feels young and who finds himself in a city where he knows no one and is trying desperately to find any meaning in life at all.

But that isn’t my voice now. To be honest, I’m not sure what my writing voice is now. I no longer feel young. I still can’t say I feel mature or middle aged but I just feel different. Like I can no longer bs myself into thinking that there is this grand mythology surrounding my life. Not that anyone should take that as a complaint. I’m happily married to the literal woman of my dreams, a woman who when I first met I turned to a friend and said “One day I am going to marry her”, so it is not as though I have any desire to go back to those days. It is just that my life has settled down and I am not sure how to write about a life where I am content. Hell, I am the only person who has a challenge dealing with the fact that he can now consider himself to be happy.

I guess I am writing this to say that I am not sure where I am going with this and it might take me a long time to get there. Some of it will be crappy. Ok, a lot of it will be crappy. Last night I read a David Foster Wallace essay as well as one from an old friend and it just drove home how far I have to go. But I really want to make this work. I have to find my voice again.

My Life as a Sitcom

I dreamt that I was in college again last week. I know, I know, there is nothing less interesting than reading about someone else’s dreams but stay with me here. There were a couple of aspects that probably give you every insight into my psyche that you will ever need to know.

1) I was heading back to my dorm room with my roommate to drop off some books and then head to the cafeteria for lunch. This was my standard protocol back in the day.

2) Once I get to the room I realize that I have not finished my lab report writeup for that afternoon’s class so instead of having lunch I was going to have to quickly try to finish it before class and skip lunch. This is more stressful than my life usually was and is probably a sign of one thing or another.

3) While realizing that I hadn’t finished the lab writeup I also realized that this is the same class that has appeared in multiple other dreams where I had attended the first day of class, which was ended early without any experiments, and then missed classes for the rest of the semester without realizing that I hadn’t dropped the class. This is my usual stress dream of the class that I forgot that I was taking. On one hand I was unnerved to realize that I only have this dream when I am stressed out of my mind. On the other hand at least I could rest assured that I had at least started trying to make it to class again.

4) My roommate was Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory.

5) My dorm room was surprisingly clean. I mean, my desk was immaculate with everything neatly stacked and no stray papers floating around. I could only dream of having a desk that clean and I guess that I apparently did.

6) Yeah, I guess I should explain point number four in greater detail.

Yes, I dreamt that I was sharing a college dorm room with Sheldon and that did not shock me in the least. I mean when I woke up it seemed perfectly logical that he would be my roommate and I was much more upset that I had waited to the last minute to finish a report and that I had missed months worth of classes and would probably fail as a result. The fact that my roommate was a) the embodiment of modern geekiness and b) fictional seemed par for the course. Which, given my experience in college, makes a lot of sense.

Being an engineering major makes for a very odd college experience. I saw somewhere online where they said that the average engineering student spends 20 hours a week on homework and my first thought was “only twenty?” I remember one four question assignment taking a team of ten of us twelve hours to complete and we still only got two of the questions right. I remember being in the EE building at 12:30 at night and not leaving because the bars closed at 1 and I didn’t want to walk past everyone leaving the bars while carrying my backpack. I don’t even think people would have made fun of me; it was just that the act of walking back to my dorm past people who had a much better night than I did was too depressing to expose myself to. As a result you end up with this strange, insular group of friends and, well, the Big Bang Theory becomes surprisingly accurate. Luckily I ended up with Penny.

Second star to the left

Ok, time to discuss some astronomy, logic and something that is either extremely interesting or depressing depending on your point of view.


We know that there are billions and billions of stars in our visible universe alone. We have found evidence of planets around stars so we can easily assume that there are billions of planets out there. Given that in our solar system we have intelligent life on one of the eight planets (Pluto isn’t a planet, sorry) and since there is nothing to indicate that we are in any way unique in the nearly infinite universe then we should expect that there is life all around us in the universe. Given that the universe is billions of years old then numerous planets should have resulted in intelligent civilizations who have achieved space travel and are exploring the universe. Except that we see no evidence of this at all leading to the question “Where the hell is everybody?”

(This is called Fermi’s Paradox as Enrico Fermi was the one who first brought this point up. It also ties in Drake’s Equation, which tries to determine the likelihood of life in the universe, and the Copernican Principle, which states that we aren’t special in the least. Why I know these things and why Kim has to constantly say “Well he’s kind of like Sheldon” when describing me are probably related.)

So here is what all of this probably means. If civilization’s natural endpoint would be massive space traveling cultures like in Star Trek or Star Wars complete with laser beams and Ewoks and the planet Endor being crushed under the debris of an exploding Death Star then the evidence of that should be easy to find. Since there isn’t though then it would seem that we never reach that point (and by we I mean intelligent civilizations across the entire history of the universe.) Or it’s because those civilizations realize that they don’t want to make anyone know where they are so they don’t broadcast themselves. Or they’ve visited us and just decided to drive on the way you do when you get off a highway exit to get some food and take one look at the McDonald’s parking lot and figure you would rather try again ten miles down the road. Or we are living inside a hologram so there is no other life because they just didn’t bother to program that bit. Though that leads to the question of who they are.

Why is this on my mind? Well, partly because I came across this on Wikipedia so I got sidetracked reading about it but mainly because we spend so much of our time thinking about the narrow piece of space and time that we inhabit. Most of the time we probably only think about the few miles we cover in a given day. We can’t really grasp just how vast and full of stuff is really out there. Sometimes it is useful to be amazed by just what is out there just outside our grasp.

Virtual Homeroom

Given that I have been on Facebook for probably five years now it is pretty amazing to see how it has impacted my life. To be honest I am not a very active user. Sure when I started I took full advantage of Facebook chat and games of Scrabulous (which was Words with Friends for people who lacked words or, uh, friends) and would regularly update my status. Now, other than the occasional status containing a really bad pun I now am more of a Facebook lurker than anything else. Kim still feels I waste too much time on it but there is an aspect to it that I find fascinating. Facebook has resulted in everyone having a Virtual Homeroom.


Look at your Facebook friends and see how many of them are from grade school or high school. Given that I switched grade schools when I was ten I literally have Facebook friends who I have not seen or spoken to in thirty years yet I get regular updates on their life. Every morning I check the news feed and I listen to the background chatter of people who I knew but don’t really know. To be honest this is exactly what high school was like for me. I knew everyone in the room but I’m not sure if I really had a clue what any of them were about.

Yet homeroom in high school plays a huge role in your life and I swear to this day that I have dreams relating to high school and homeroom. It was where you heard the daily gossip and complaints and news of the day. Nothing really happened but you saw the cliques form and alliances dissolve and friendships and relationships morph daily. It was a place where a group of people gathered for fifteen minutes a day for no reason other than circumstance brought them together.

When I first started thinking about this I started to wonder if it would be good if you had homeroom throughout your entire life. Imagine every workday you met in a room with people, some of whom you would never see again that day, and hear the daily announcements and get the updates on the day. I guess we would now host it in a Starbucks as I couldn’t see surviving that atmosphere without coffee but I started to envision what it would be like to just have that daily gathering. Over time as people moved about they would switch homerooms and others would join in just like when you had the new kid in school. The daily drama of homeroom would play out throughout adulthood. I still don’t know if that would be a good thing or not.

But the more I thought about it the more I realized that is entirely what Facebook is. There is no substance there. You can state your political opinions or your theoretically funny shared greeting cards or spam game requests but for the most part none of it actually matters. It is just a spattering of gossip and clans and complaints about life. It really is the same as homeroom and it is now permanent. You can’t escape the people you happened to meet when you were nine years old. They now follow you for the rest of your life. It scares me as to how this will affect kids today. I know I spent a good portion of high school wanting to just get beyond this incredibly awkward point of my life. Now you never get to leave.

Wednesday Night Music Club: I am not sure which of the old blog standards are going to survive into this new format but this one probably will. Besides, I would have to share this performance by Beth Orton with everyone anyway. This is her song Magpie off of her latest album (CD? iTunes release? What the hell do we call new music now?) When I first saw this I was just floored. Something about repeating the line “What a lie looks like” with that slightly flawed voice of hers just stopped me in my tracks.

Well, at least we scored 14 points...

My thoughts on last night’s game and a few other things that are floating around my head at the moment…




1) The irony is not lost on me that at one point during the night I switched from the game to watch The Biggest Loser again. Though it is always fun to watch Jillian Michaels swear at overweight people and then act shocked when those same people somehow are not encouraged to lose weight.

2) I had hope for the Irish last night and at least thought that they could keep the game close but they just could not hang with Alabama. My hope was that the game would start like the Oklahoma game where Alabama would put up big drives but get forced into field goals and then ND would get a big play to flip the game around. Instead they just could not make a stop all night and stood no chance at all. I will agree with a few other commentators though, I am not sure if there were many college teams that could have put up a good fight last night.

3) I would say that the biggest problem Notre Dame had was the long break between games. The Irish had been playing on emotion all season and had played well beyond what people had expected. When a team like that faces a long layoff that cohesiveness and spirit falls away and they just come out flat. On the other hand, Bama just rested up and healed and got back on track. Big difference.

4) Flying out of Florida this morning to Chicago I saw a lot of sad looking people in Notre Dame gear and this is from an airport several hours drive away from Miami. What I will say about that is that it must have been an amazing atmosphere there before the game if that is a sign as to how many ND fans traveled to the game. I knew several people who went and Kim and I were debating it over the past few weeks. I bet it was a good time no matter what the outcome.

5) For those wondering, that makes my alma maters 0 for 2 in title games in major sports (and screw you Sean May). I guess I should just be happy that my schools can occasionally compete at that level especially given that I am an Illini. One day we will have a football program in Champaign.

6) My one pop culture note for the night: I really hope that Taylor Swift’s next single is called “I apparently have long unresolved commitment issues.”

Once in a Lifetime

I can’t take credit for the following, as I heard the sentiment voiced on a Chris Hardwick podcast, but I can agree completely. Every year that passes causes the song “Once in a Lifetime” to make a hell of a lot more sense than it did the year before.

Let’s start by putting things in perspective. The song came out in 1981 when I was eight and if I remember correctly we got cable in 1982 or 1983 so I would have been nine or ten when I first saw the video. And what would that video mean to me as a kid? Well, it was bizarre enough to make me laugh. Here is a skinny guy with glasses in a suit, sweating like mad, just flailing about and periodically making chopping motions on his arm. Absolutely nothing made sense, David Byrne bounces in and out of frame, and throughout all this time there is this amazing back beat while David wonders “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.” At ten, I found this to be unbelievably cool and, sad to say, probably had already realized that I would grow up to look, sweat and dance pretty much exactly like David Byrne does in this video.

“You may ask yourself: Well? How did I get here?”

I’m turning forty this year. This is not unusual. Everyone born in 1973 will experience this same phenomenon this year so I can’t act as if this is some type of great insight but it really is hitting me. And to be honest, I have no idea how I got here. I do have a beautiful house with a beautiful wife. And I find myself behind the wheel of a…Ford Taurus, which is a very respectable automobile if I can say so myself. For the longest time I would never have dreamed to be in this position when I turned forty. Sometimes I still can’t believe it.

“You may ask yourself: How do I work this?”

The fact is getting older hasn’t made me feel as though I am more of an adult even though clearly I am. I still have dreams about high school and college and like apparently every other male my age we just can’t seem to grow up. I own a full collection of Voltron DVDs. I am still searching for a good collection of the full series of the Monkees and have gotten into serious debates as to why they need to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Half the time I look around clueless and the other half I pretend that I actually know what I am doing. It works, somehow, yet the older I get the more baffled by the world I seem to become. That sense of self-righteousness disappears as the gray hair makes it first appearance.

“You may ask yourself: Am I right? Am I wrong?”

I’ve basically stopped writing for the past few years after literally writing a novel a year for over a decade. (Well, more like I wrote more than 60,000 words a year with absolutely no connection between them other than I was the one typing.) It was probably a big mistake as writing is my main release of thoughts and ideas and tension and all of those other things. But the reason my writing output slowed was because I actually had a life. Kim and I started dating and got engaged and got married and I had to go through this process of changing from I to We which is still a challenge that I haven’t quite mastered. While it is great to know that my personal life and my career have far surpassed what I have ever hoped for it just seems wrong to not sit down and write and give my view of the world.

“Time isn’t holding us; Time isn’t after us.”

So I guess I will be back in the blogging biz if I can hold to my New Year’s Resolution. I have no idea what is ahead of me, or where in my day I am going to find the time to sit down with a laptop and just see where the words take me. Like the Mayans, I didn’t expect to get here. But the journey is always fun.

I’ll end with a quote that my favorite writer, Jonathan Carroll, posted to Facebook this week that has sat on my mind the way most of his quotes do. “Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”