All of My Friends are Older Than Me
This weekend, a friend of mine is celebrating his 40th birthday. It’s funny, I often joke that I surround myself with people who are older and less successful than me so I can feel better about myself. It isn’t true, of course. Most of my friends are older than me but we all seem to be at the same relative success level. So I find myself thinking about what I want to get him for his birthday. At his age he can afford just about anything he wants so it needs to be a little more personal. Read more »
Posted: September 9th, 2008 under Friends.
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So we’ve been working on potty training for Piers lately. I never thought I’d talk this much about waste elimination in my life. Now when we potty trained his sister she picked it up pretty quickly. It didn’t take too long for here to get the idea of what we wanted her to do and she did her best. I remember being slightly frustrated by it but also that it was not too many weeks of working on it. Now Piers, on the other hand, likes to go to great lengths (it seems) to show us how different he is from Hope. People say boys are more difficult to potty train and based on a study of two toddlers, I can agree. 
I’ve always been a “nice guy.” There is a comment lament, one I’ve said myself, that the good-looking girls always go for the jerks and leave the nice guy out in the dust. While there is truth to it, it took me years to realize that the girl that goes for the jerk is not the girl I would be happy with. Also I just cannot be a jerk; it is not in my nature. There is also an image that nice guys get hosed in life by those not as nice. They get bad deals at the car lot, settle for mediocre service, and are easily intimidated. The problem with this is the fact that people confuse being nice with being passive; not wanting to offend. The two are definitely not equal and you can certainly be a nice guy but not a pushover. As the great philosopher Patrick Swayze says in the movie Roadhouse “Be nice until it is time to not be nice.” 
I mentioned earlier that last year I finished my first novel. It was a pretty big accomplishment for me. Although I’d written books before, this was the first time I created a long fictional piece. Overall the story is solid, the characters are good, and I’m very pleased with it. Recently I’ve let a group of writers’ critique it and astonishingly they all have positive things to say about it. There are little things I need to fix but overall the response has been very positive. Unfortunately, one place where the response has not been positive is in my quest to find an agent. It’s been about 8 months since I started and I’ve not moved forward an inch. 
Growing up I was always interested in magic. My Grandfather always had a trick or two with them and would entertain anyone within earshot with it. I collected magic tricks of all sorts and practices fairly regularly on them. I even did a children’s birthday party complete with levitating woman at the end of the show. Eventually I got interested in other things, but I always kept a trick or two in my memory in case the opportunity ever arose. Periodically I check out books from the library on magic tricks and practice a few of them. I still have my old case of magic tricks and the kids become thrilled when I pull it out. There isn’t anything really special in there, just your garden variety tricks, but it still holds wonder for the kids.