Dribbling Ink

(This is a story I should have shared long before now. Make sure you have some time to spare—this one is lengthy.) Two years ago my wife was accepted into a summer internship program at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. We were still living in Arkadelphia at the time, but my wife didn't want to spend the summer making the hour drive, fighting traffic to and from Little Rock. So we decided to live in Little Rock for the summer. However, in case you don’t know, it’s difficult finding a place to live for two months. Most rentals don’t have two-month leases. If they do, the price is either ridiculous or it’s a place you do not want to live. After looking for a couple of weeks, my wife found an extended stay hotel—Value Place—advertising for like $500 a month on Craigslist. A number of things. I didn't know anything about extended stay hotels—oh how I want to be naive about extended stays again, but more on this topic shortly. All I knew was that a...

Forget the election. Forget 10-14 days from now when Arkansas AD Jeff Long is supposed to announce the next head football coach of the Razorbacks. The most important revelation of 2012 came on Monday, November 26: There is going to be a Boy Meets World sequel… Girl Meets World . Two shows defined my adolescence: Saved by the Bell and Boy Meets World . The SbtB sequel has already been done, so I guess it was only a matter of time for Cory and Topanga. Of course, my heart is torn. Will it live up to the original? I don’t have children, so how will I justify watching this show? Will Shawn be on the show? (I haven’t seen him tweet anything yet—although he hosts an entertaining podcast, “Literary Disco.”) What about Eric? The little sister (I don't think I ever knew her name. Talk about a storyline that was underdeveloped; SbtB  had nothing on sister Matthews)? Here’s what we know—yes, I actually did some research. Cory and Topanga will be back as parents. Their...

I’ve spent my life wasting things. Part of this is because I’ve always lacked the ability to focus on a single purpose. (Forgive me for the high school examples, but they are the easiest.) When I played football, I wanted to be playing basketball—so I quit football. When I was playing basketball, I was thinking about girls—so I was always distracted. When I was dating a girl, I was thinking about another girl—so I made a mess of a lot of relationships. But I’ve always justified my decisions because they eventually work out well enough. After all, I watched my cousin get his femur snapped in half playing football a couple of years later, I was an All-State basketball player and our team made the state tournament, and I married a beautiful, intelligent, driven woman (who has helped me realize and correct my weaknesses, for which I am grateful). My decisions couldn’t have been too bad, right? However, now I wish that I would have never quit football, that I had actually given ...