Friends are important. Really important.

I was thinking about another benefit of friendship today when an acquaintance on the telephone began exploring deeply personal issues and crossing boundaries with his frustrations.  I didn’t really know this guy that well, and I was a bit shocked at his behavior.  Then it dawned on me, he is friendless.  Although he has plenty of acquaintances, he has not confidant. Therefore a stranger, an animal, or a lightpost can take away his pain.

High times, toasts, and roaring laughter I often associated with friendship, but vulnerability, trust, and accountability are another face of friends. As humans we need partnerships of trust to listen to our pain, counsel us in our grief, and kick us squarely in the seat of the pants from time to time. These partnerships enable us to appropriately invest our intimate feelings in safe harbors, and then we can regroup for the rest of the world.  But a relationally fractured individual may freely invest intimacy inappropriately, or, on the other hand, they may harden and invest nowhere–ultimately left to die an emotional death.

Today, I was shocked and amused at the conversation, but ultimately I was left with pity. A world so full of people yet so fragmented.

Okay, Doug, I left that one without saying anything smart ass at the end, so there.

Don’t choke on your Ritalin when I say this, but I love to work with people who have ADD. Or, maybe I can’t stand working with people that don’t, the bores.  Either way, I made a startling discovery today:  I have deep respect for those that can run laps (and rabbit trails) around the others.

After a meeting this morning (with someone whom I had assumed to be more OCD than ADD), I exclaimed to a colleague, “[Blank] is VERY smart!”  I loved the fact that we were carrying on multiple conversations with as many digressions as a schizophrenic on a speed date.

Gone are the days of lonely pill popping and single track thoughts. I am talking on the phone, IM’ing, writing this damn blog post, which is something that I should probably be doing more, but I am juggling more balls than the Emperors Club at the moment. Er, stay on track. I love to be pushed and pulled by data from all sides.  I love to see things from all sides and run rabbit trails of tangential thought.

Attention advantaged of the world unite and shake the chains of bondage…

Cresting the hill of 129 South just past campus, I was in a race to get home and crack open my Tennessee Law Instute update cold beer and get down to some bar studying. Simultaneously, I spotted the cop parked out under the bridge and my speedometer boasting 70–I knew I was screwed. Like any respectible red handed criminal, I slammed on the brakes–admitting my guilt, conforming to the law, and possibly seeking mercy. I approached the policeman with caution observing every movement of the patrol car, but there were none. I peered into the drivers’ seat and the policeman was in another world gabbing away on his cell phone. Ahhh off the hook.

Only problem was that I had to drive 75 the rest of the way home to make up for that short slow down. It’s a good thing there weren’t any more traffic monitors!

…is that you can always think of a worse situation.

WHOA!  What a year this is going to be?  We have milestone years in our life, but this one will perhaps be the most significant for me.  Things to do this year:

1. Turn Thirty.
2. Graduate from Law School.
3. Take (and pass) the bar.
4. Have another baby (not me personally, of course).
5. Begin my professional career.

Here I sit January 1 at a Starbucks thinking about all of this–kind of surreal.

Happy New Year.

Pat Robertson doesn’t have to tell you that the world is a seemingly scary place to live right now. Natural disasters, Wars, and Terrorism are all around. Now, the threat of a pandemic is evolving into a perfect storm with the spread of the bird flu through the East. To all of this doom and gloom I say, “Eat, Drink, and be Merry!” This saying connotes, strong middle ages usage. In that time there was little predictability to health and mortality. But somehow in our modern world we feel that we can predict our lives. We plan our lives out for 5, 10, 25, 50 years into the future, but we have no guarantees. The one guarantee that we do have is that you are reading this right now. Talk about carpe diem. You may finish reading this post and be wiped off the face of the earth, which figures poorly in to your life’s plan. So, my advice is: make sure you have a good life insurance policy, a well drafted will, take seriously the serious things in life (family, friends, and beer), and Eat, Drink, and be Merry!

I don’t want to strike fear in anyone. MSNBC, CNN, and FoxNews are such experts at distributing desperation that I would not want to diminish their impact. I just have one question: What usually happens when we travel? When I travel I usually get the sniffles–at a minimum and sometimes I get far sicker. As far as I understand this phenomenon, our immune systems build up antibodies to local environmental viruses and bacteria. When we are exposed to foreign strains of disease, we are ill-prepared to deal with those strains. New Orleans is forcing every citizen to evacuate the city. As we have seen, the city is one of the poorest cities in the nation. Obviously, survival and not healthcare has been a priority among many of the citizens. So, when half of a million people are distributed across the United States, they seem to be simultaneously planting their disease all across the country and invading territories of foreign disease with poor defenses. Could this be a recipe for a far greater disaster? As stated, I am not a doctor or scientist, so maybe someone more equipped could better address this issue.

As I have watched obsessed over Katrina’s devastation this last week, through my media center computer, I have really thought about the hobbies that I have in my life. The winds and the water came into these people’s lives and wiped away all investments that they had. Months and years of acquiring “things” was wiped away in the matter of hours, in turn, the victims will get a piece of paper–at best. While watching the finely tuned news channels, I realize that countless days and hours went into creating my truly all-in-one media center. I watch all my movies, listen to all my MP3s, watch and record live TV, download dynamic content, and even read blogs on this media masterpiece, but it did not come cheap. I paid 2 hours of reading to my daughter, 1 hour of teaching her how to ride her bike, 30 minutes of watching her gently drift into sleep, 4 hours of dinner conversations with my wife, 8 hours of pool time with the family etc. My innocent hobbies look like a real waste. Of course, today I can point to the media center and say, “yeah but come on this thing really rocks (which it really does).” But that is so hard to quantify when filing a claim with the insurance company. Even worse, the insurance companies don’t offer riders for “time lost with family” or loss of consortium. Don’t get me wrong, I am a material man from way back, and I am not formally renouncing my materialism or my hobbies. I am, however, noting that there may be some calculus that I should apply to my hobbies. For example, brewing beer should override updating the caller id function of the media center. Why? Because beer brings people together, and because it is evidence that God truly loves us. Hobbies are pastimes when time is surplus, but when time becomes a commodity, hobbies become investments. The idle time that we once were able to spend frying ants with magnifying glasses transforms into invaluable seconds. Later in life, people would stake fortunes to recreate those misspent and forever vanished seconds.