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As we motored the sailboat gently into its slip at sunset, there was bedlam on the dock.
A couple dozen people were hanging out there and upon a large sailboat adjacent, eating and drinking—but mostly drinking. “Welcome to Laurie’s birthday!” they shouted.
It took awhile for someone to come over and grab our lines to help us tie off (something we didn’t strictly need but is always nice to have).
Read MoreAs painful as it is to see kids dealing with academic challenges, it’s even more heartbreaking to bear witness to their social difficulties.
In a school setting, it’s very common to see kids who are unable to connect easily with peers begin to act out in unpleasant ways in order to attract negative attention as a substitute for the positive attention they crave.
When even that stops working (if it ever did), you might hear a sad and familiar line: “These kids are stupid! I don’t want to play with them anyway.”
Read MoreWhen I was in my early twenties, I took a job teaching public school for a very low salary.
Frankly, I could have made more waiting tables, which was the other skill set I possessed.
The challenge was that I’d be working in an area with a shortage of affordable housing. The additional challenge was that I was a bit of a snob who had grown up on the coast and wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to move inland, far from my family (and for that matter, my job). What was I going to do?
Read MoreWhen I was sixteen, I performed for the first time with a band, a small acoustic trio we called Trip. We opened for our friends in Orange, a power-pop outfit, at the rec center of Star of the Sea Catholic Church in our hometown of York, Maine.
I had been playing guitar for only a few months. Our repertoire was mostly covers, including the Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California.”
Looking back, I cannot recall a moment in which I thought, “Maybe no one wants to hear us play a seven-minute song” or “Who am I to get up in front of people and play music?”
Read MoreIt takes only a few seconds of Facebook to throw off my equilibrium. I believe this is exactly what it was designed to do.
Even if I went there for a specific purpose, I come away feeling discontented and uncomfortable, as though I accidentally read a friend’s diary. In a sense, that’s what I’ve done.
As a kid growing up, I didn’t know what parties I was missing due to my relative social awkwardness or what opportunities I was losing out on due to my family’s relative lack of wealth. I wasn’t even privy to conversations in which these things were hinted at. I existed in a small world, focused on the people and pastimes that mattered most to me.
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