when i was a kid, i always had a list of christmas wishes as long as your arm, and, in true childish fashion, every single one of those wishes was for me... it took me a long time to really understand the old saying, "'tis better to give than to receive". when i was a kid, that idea just made absolutely no sense at all to me; i mean, after all, what could be better than getting everything you'd asked for, and more? (not that i often got more than i asked for; i asked for a lot, and i was only one of five kids in my family. in fact, i very seldom got everything that i asked for, but that never stopped me from making that list as long as my arm...) christmas wish

did you ever go to one of those websites where they have a little digital clock that tells you what time it was when you got to the site? pretty amazing, until you realize that all they're doing is sending a message to your computer that asks your computer's internal clock what time it is and then prints the answer out in the form of a clock when it draws the page in your browser window. the other thing about those little digital clocks is that they're always wrong. it's true. by the time you look at them (in fact, by the time the page is drawn in your browser window), they're showing you what time it used to be, not what time it actually is. what time is it?

a while back, i got an email from a friend (and fellow recovering nicotine addict) who was obviously upset about something. on the surface of it, it looked like she was pissed off at me: the message didn't sound at all like her; it was short to the point of being curt (two sentences), almost threatening in tone, and she'd signed it, "Your friend, ******" - which she'd never done before. then i found out that one of our mutual acquaintances (who we'd both been encouraging in her own fight to get free of the nicodemon) had gone back to smoking over the weekend, without emailing or calling anyone until after the fact. and although my friend hadn't said this outright in her message (it would've been tough to squeeze it into those two sentences...), i had the feeling that this was what she was really upset about. new year's resolution

yesterday, i went back to work for the first time since december 21st (the winter solistice; the darkest day of the year. supposedly. actually, the darkest day of the year was yesterday). yesterday was also the epiphany (at least for me). i know; this is totally mixing up all the western european time conventions (at least calendar conventions). can't be helped. darkest day of the year

my father wrote his own obituary. dad's obituary