Rant

Texts: Awesome! Time to chat! 
Emails:  Wonder what they want?  Guess I'll need to get to that sometime to day. 
Phone calls: Oh God, who's died?  I can't take this today.

Rant

Sometimes, the first step to forgiveness is understanding the other person is a complete idiot... or at least, that's what my girlfriend keeps telling me.

Rant

My favorite part of Twitter is saying something I think is really funny and then waiting anxiously while people fail to immediately validate me. 

66.) If you're starting more than one sentence with "Actually..." in a conversation, nobody likes you.

(A bit of advice that I wish someone had told me in high school.)  Nerds take note.

Rant

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.  Thanks to mobile apps, dating is a bitch of an uphill battle if you're not the one with breasts in the relationship.

51.) Ultimately, marriage is not about getting something -- it's about giving it.

"Strangely, men understand this more than we do. Probably because for them marriage involves sacrificing their most treasured possession -- a free-agent penis -- and for us, it's the culmination of a princess fantasy so universal, it built Disneyland. The bottom line is that marriage is just a long-term opportunity to practice loving someone even when they don't deserve it. Because most of the time, your messy, farting, macaroni-and-cheese eating man will not be doing what you want him to. But as you give him love anyway -- because you have made up your mind to transform yourself into a person who is practicing being kind, deep, virtuous, truthful, giving, and most of all, accepting of your own dear self -- you will find that you will experience the very thing you wanted all along: Love."

Source: "Why You're Not Married" by Tracy McMillan First published on The Huffington Post, February 13, 2011.

35.) You will attract who you deserve. If you don’t like who you are getting, change yourself.  If you can’t change yourself, get a reality check.

Sort of a Tough Love version of "you have to love yourself before you can love someone else."

Source: "Advice for women turning 30" by Penelope Trunk, February 17th, 2011.

34.) Life doesn't amount to much without someone to spend it with.

...and it helps if you get to spend it with your best friend.

Connected

So here it is, Thanksgiving weekend, and everyone's thoughts are turned to friends and family, and the connections that make up the community of which we are each a part.

I suppose, to most people it's funny that I reduce such transcendent ideals as "family" and "community" down to their most simplistic technological analog, but it's only natural to me, spending as much time as I do thinking about networks. 

I spend so much of my time thinking of the network radiating outward from me, that it's sometimes too easy to forget that there are other type of networks that are fundamental to who and what I am. Less than a decade after the inception of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee wrote in "Weaving the Web,"

"In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related.

There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. there are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected."

In this instance, Berners-Lee extrapolates lessons on computer networks from cellular level interactions, but I think that his wisdom applies just as readily on scales in the opposite direction. Connections, whether at a cellular, syntactical, or interpersonal define who we are. And there's nothing like a family reunion to remind you of that.

Maybe a bit inappropriate for a G-rated blog, but it deserves to be said. Nothing about being a geek or a nerd keeps a person from becoming a sexual dynamo.

13.) If giving the name of the city you live in, the college you attended, and the company you work for is your life story, it's time for you to get a new life.

Start by disconnecting your cable and putting the television in storage.

12.) When it comes time for a difficult conversation, always tell the hard truth first.

9.) Be careful of any situation you have to reason through logically. If you need to work to reason out the matter, you're probably missing something that has absolutely nothing to with logic - like somebody's feelings.