"Not sure how I made it through my whole life to this point having never seen nor heard of these authors."

This comment was, in fact, a text which I sent to a friend today after spending two hours absorbed in the opening pages of Foucault's Pendulum.  After my brain started to cloud up from the sheer intake of new information, I decided to take a bath and think.  (Meditation, as far as I am concerned, is always best in a tub full of hot water.)  The outcome of my steam-infused journey of self-analysis eventually brought me back to that one nagging question:  How had I managed to make it to 30 without having ever heard of Umberto Eco?

The answer was painfully simple and drew me back to this neglected journal.  While I have always thought, or perhaps deluded myself into believing that the people with whom I have spent the majority of my adult life were intelligent, the truth is that a lot of them were just gamer nerds.  One can be smart enough to be good at games, but not necessarily be intellectual.  That led me to another difficult question.  Have I been short-changing myself?  The answer came to me as a resounding "yes," the Chorus, for once, in unanimous agreement.

Now.  Here.  In such an unexpected place in my life, I find myself face to face with a man who is not only just as smart as I am, but has me assuredly trumped on an alarming number of subjects where I have always considered myself well above-average.  To say that this disturbs me is almost an understatement.  I say "almost" only for the fact that I do not, or perhaps cannot feel threatened by this man.  While there is a healthy amount of teasing involved when one of us gets the intellectual upper-hand, there is no condescension between us.  When he unearths some bit of ignorance in me, it doesn't hurt as it so often has in the past - as I often expect it to.  There is no sting to my pride.  He simply nudges me in the right direction.  He teaches.  I learn.

"You've been giving a chance to be happy," I told him once.  Something that I've come to realize with him is that there is always some form of turnaround.  For everything that I've given him, he's given something back whether it's been consciously or not.  In exchange for smiles, he has given me knowledge -- something I needed or perhaps desperately wanted.  I didn't even know it until he came along.  And I could be wrong, but I am fairly certain that the same holds true in reverse.

Thought for the day:  "Smiles are contagious."