I put my life out there by way of social media because I love connecting with so many people. My perspectives and views have been broadened by countless conversations and debates with people from around the world. I met my girlfriend through social media, she is a real-life friend of one of my real-life friends. She was severely sunburned at a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game. I commented on her post about the burn, instructing her to immediately start taking aspirin as it helps prevent (or lessen) the symptoms of sunburn. I’ve been using this trick to avoid sunburn for years. I can’t explain to you why this works, but it does. When I followed up with her in a couple days, she was feeling much better and I asked her if she wanted to get coffee.
Instead of coffee, Jessica and I went to Nakama for sushi. I never cared much for sushi, but I had only tried it twice prior to our date. That night, I fell in love with two things: my girlfriend and sushi, but mostly sushi (just kidding!) She also taught me how to use chopsticks, something that I didn’t think I would ever be able to do. In hindsight, my inability to learn chopsticks was mostly laziness. I was trying to impress her and I forced myself to work through that laziness. Now, I can pretty much eat anything with chopsticks.
I don’t ever think I’ll have the following of someone like Philip Defranco, but I certainly wouldn’t complain if I did. I’ve had my fifteen minutes a couple times over, but I always seem to lose momentum before I can turn it into anything. The first time this happened was during the Half Life 2 source code leak. I started a submission-driven, detective style blog to help apprehend the hacker responsible for leaking the source code. Why? Because immediately after the leak, Valve had the community convinced that Half Life 2 would never ship. Teenagers everywhere were furious! Just imagine the reaction at a geriatric center if you suddenly announced that Wheel of Fortune was cancelled. Someone was going to pay!
