I’m the youngest of my family.  The baby.  Or as I was known – Bibbity Bobert.  In my family, it goes girl, boy, girl, me.  And in my family, life was pretty damn tough.  It wasn’t enough that we were dirt poor or that we dressed in the leftovers from the Salvation Army.  In the cosmic scheme of things, I guess it wasn’t enough that the other kids laughed, teased, and bullied us.  No, there had to be more.  And that ‘more’ was my dad and my mom.  They were two of a kind and by that I mean that there have never been two people more poorly suited to parenthood.  Somehow they found each other and created the lot of us.

No child asks for it.  Its completely the luck of the draw.  Or bad luck, I guess.  I think back to my childhood and shake my head at the feelings that I remember being as constant as the night stars.  Fear, sadness, insecurity.  I know that I was lucky somehow.  My siblings coped the worst of it.  Somehow I was spared.  Maybe it was because I was the baby of the family. [Read Column]

My wife is a dentist.  Specifically, she is a prosthodontist.  Her procedures involve using pliers to remove teeth, drilling into the gums to place titanium implants, shoving needles into the hard palette, and many other gruesome tortures that seem spawned from the Spanish Inquisition.  And at times, she calls me up and asks me to sit chair-side as her dental assistant.  While I sit there, holding the suction and keenly watching the patient in the chair, I have compiled an extensive mental database on human psychology.  Specifically, the psychology of pain. [Read Column]

I joined Phi Gamma Delta in 1997.  I was a junior.  My foray to Marquette University in frozen Milwaukee had ended in a broken heart and $30,000 in debt from just a single year of study.  I had followed a girl.  And it had failed, predictably so.  Still, I believe it was better to see it through.  I’m a romantic at heart, I guess.  Afterwards, I came home – to Stillwater – where I had always returned when life had given me a hard lesson and re-enrolled in Oklahoma State University.

In my absence, nearly all of my high school friends in one way or another had joined up with this fraternity known as Fiji.  A fraternity.  It was nearly a dirty word to me.  I hated the stereotype – drunken, half-witted alpha males – but I was told that this one was different.  This house was special.  It was blessed with young men that had true character – the kind of character and conviction that could change your life if you let it.  With reluctance, I signed and moved into the chapter house as a pledge.

Throughout my pledgeship, I looked to the brothers for proof of this character.  I studied them intently with a cynical eye.  I was surprised as I found many young men with considerable intelligence and promising talent.  Young men that I was proud to call friends, friends that I still keep to this day.  Yet among them all there was one person that stood before the rest.  I could see in him something else, something special,

His name was Wade.

He made me laugh.  He became my friend.  He became my roommate and my brother.  He changed my heart. [Read Column]

Last weekend, Eldrick Tiger Woods played in his first golf tournament in 65 years after getting his ass beat by his wife with a nine iron.  His first tournament was the Augusta National Golf Club … or as I like to call it – the Klan’s Major.  Tiger finished fourth, which is mightily impressive considering he was freebasing Ambien with vodka shooters and engaging in auto-asphyxiation with one of John Daly’s ex-wives.

Well, that’s what I heard …

Regardless of what may or may not have transpired, Tiger has been covered ad nauseum in the last five months.  He’s a cheater.  He’s a sex addict.  He’s a delusional celebrity.  I have a different perspective.  I have the truth about Tiger. [Read Column]

Mum was a mumbler.  She mumbled all the time,  an unending stream of Vietnamese.  She was talking to nobody, but she was talking to everybody.  It didn’t matter.  Whoever was in earshot was her audience.  Whether she was cooking, folding laundry, dusting, or any of the other thousand domestic chores that made the day, her sweet, but hardly audible voice was always at work.  Mostly she complained.  About the weather, about aches and pains, about her in-laws, about no one listening to what she had to say.

Mum would mumble and Cha would roll his eyes with feigned exasperation. [Read Column]