Wednesday, January 31, 2007

I don't give a Rip for being Van Winkle.

Long pauses deserve deep thoughts, but I have none, save for this meager offering: you can never truly do something well without being passionate about that thing.

That's what I've told at least three people in the last few days. And if you want proof, just take a look at my incredibly talented, yet painfully struggling Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets basketball team. Not one player on the team looked like he wanted to take a shot down the stretch in a meeting with wimpy Wake Forest earlier tonight, leading to the team's fourth straight defeat. The moral to the story: talent will get you nowhere by itself and you don't just stumble into victory. Make a plan and take the steps.

So I took a long winter's nap from blogging and I might head back to my perverbial writer's bed to take another sooner rather than later. To borrow from Bobby Brown, it's my prerogative. In battle with a lack of motivation to blog on one front and preoccupied with a perpetual cold that borders on the verge of pnuemonia on another. Sometime in late November my throat started growing a nasty gallery of ulcers and soon thereafter the illness (I suppose it was strep throat. If you don't know why your throat hurts just call it "strep throat" and you're likely to be right.) made a southward turn down the bronchials and took up residence until sometime around Christmas.

I discovered Mucinex just before the yuletide season and with its help figured I had sent my foe in a full retreat. I hiked like a mad mountain goat and spent a good deal of time becoming a torrid powerwalker. I slept right. I even ate right. Well, let's say better than normal. And as I was on a walk one day last week, I made the stunning discovery that I had not been sick in some four weeks. Of course, the next morning I set a new world record for sneezing (both in number and long-distance spraying). Thankfully, I think the sequel to the initial sickness will prove far less lengthy and less dramatic, though my less than concise (wordy perhaps?) description of the episode might suggest otherwise. Mucinex and Airborne are waging war on my puny immune system as I type.

I'm continually amazed at what little I know about most of my friends' lives the older I get. My friend Shad....wait a minute. Are people still friends when one friend has a kid and the other friend doesn't even know that there's a kid on the way until after the birth? Anyway, Shad and his wife Melissa apparently are proud parents to a boy named Jacob. I think that's the name. Perhaps if I were a better friend I would remember the name too, hmm? Dave, you went to French Guyana or something like that? Is that right. Matty, oh yeah, you still live in China with your wife and child that speaks Chinese (???). Jason, have you and Amanda moved back to Dayton without telling me or is that still the long-range goal? It's not that I don't care, it's just that somehow life seems a lot faster than it used to.

To close I've got two strong suggestions:

1. Check out Switchfoot's Oh! Gravity. I've listened to little else since picking it out of the mailbox a few days before Christmas. I was impressed with the band's live show in Nashville (which coincided with round one of the illness), but this cd pretty much makes them my favorite musical choice. It's hard to rank the songs, but Awakening, Circles and Dirty Second Hands never get old for me.

2. Facebook.com is good, so much better than the Sodom and Gomorrah Myspace.com. Not only are there no nasty ads asking you if you're "naughty or nice" on the log-in screen, but it's much easier to keep up with friends. It seems many Facebook users get hung up in how many "friends" each other has, but if you can sidestep this pit (which anyone with any measure of maturity should be able to) it's a really good thing. And if you can get over the "I-don't-want-to-do-it-because-everyone-else-is-doing-it" silliness, you might just like it.