Yesterday was a moment of weakness, I'll grant you. I made the mistake of looking at blogging empirically, as a pure activity of time usage, and prioritized it behind 1) playing with my children, 2) feeding my children, 3) cleaning up after my children, 4) getting my children into their pajamas, 5) getting my children back into their pajamas, 6) getting my children to brush their teeth, 7) getting them to brush all their teeth, not just the popular ones but also the wallflowers hiding in the back, and 8) sleeping. Such is one's process when you spend three or four hours working on 1-7 and then more time on 8 than you anticip'ated, on the couch among the MegaBlocks.
So here I am, recuperating from one of those "Wake Up, It's Time For Bed" moments and reflecting on yesterday's filler post, which sucked. I felt bad about it, you felt bad about it, and whatever happens I'll never feel as though I really scaled Mt. Bloppington this year as I did in 2006. That said, I feel I owe you a little something better, so here goes:
When I was was a teenager, my best friend was a fellow nerd named Sam. He was the first kid I met when I moved to a new school system when I was 12, and we fell in like with each other almost right away because we had so many similar nerdy interests. Like taping Monty Python and the Holy Grail off of PBS with a cassette recorder, and playing it over and over again until we had memorized it, and over-attempting to work lines from the movie into everyday conversations. My first year in the new town was a tough one, because I felt I was always being tested by all the different cliques to see if I was worthy of inclusion. The result was the kind of social pressure that sends a kid up to his bedroom chanting about the Knights of Nee.
We stayed very close friends until our early 20s, when he got married and moved away, physically and emotionally. I'm thinking about him now as I usually do at least once this time of year, because his birthday is coming up soon. I think I might have an old e-mail address hanging around here somewhere ...
[to be continued]
