One Man's Journey

It's one thing to be unpopular and quite another to be unaccepted. In high school I had the unenviable honor of being too nerdy for the popular kids and too popular for the nerdy kids. If you think being rejected by a cheerleader with a perfect smile stings, try being turned away by a dungeon master with a rat tail and a collection of multi-sided dice. (A few years out of high school you realize these arbitrary cliques are meaningless, as rat tails are swapped for brief cases, but the memory of exclusion remains.) This was my high school lot in life, and so I spent my years in public school drifting from clique to clique without a home. As a social-circle transient, I interacted with a lot of cliques. There were the hackers who dove into dumpsters in the middle of the night, throwing coffee grounds and banana peels aside in search of passwords. They had no higher purpose other than to find access to technology they weren't otherwise allowed to explore. There were band gee...

I learned to dive in my 30s. Before learning to dive, I cannonballed my way through most of my life. It's a messy but practical technique. Truth be told, water and I are not friends; we're friends-of-friends who play nice but prefer not to be around each other. So when I have run out of excuses and find myself compelled to jump in, there's no time for wading. There's no time for gracefully slipping in-between waves like silk sheets. There's only time to make a big splash, balled up like a scared toddler who's also hoping to do a little damage. In the end, it wasn't the water that upset my perfect plan. It was my wife who got in the way. So there I was on the edge of a swimming pool, feet flat on the rim, body crouched till I was nearly sitting on the hot tile, and my wife towering over me like a Catholic-school nun. Just about ready to tip into the water, I heard a father at the other end of the pool say to his 5-year-old daughter, "Look, Honey. D...