Southwestern Advantage Blog

i recently went with a few of my best friends on the planet to see a concert. we watched passion pit perform at terminal 5 in new york city. we went into the show with complete disregard for the opinions that other concert attendees may have had about us. we had the time of our lives. our entire group was sporting glow-in-the-dark florescent colored glowsticks -- around our necks, our wrists and forearms, our belt loops, and sticking out of our hair. we wondered beforehand if we might be the only ones glowing that night. we were; and we loved it. we bounced and danced and sang our hearts out. we were 100% in the moment and loving the experience for exactly what it was, while we were in it.  so thinking about our night struck a chord with me. who the heck cares what anyone else thinks about you? who cares about that opinion someone has created in their mind about you? opinions always change anyway, because as people we always grow and learn.  if you follow your priori...

There is a guy on my swim team who is brutally uninteresting. You're probably imagining a quiet, shy person who can't make eye contact and hardly ever says a word. Wrong.  This fellow is talkative, chatty, and chronically outgoing. So much so that he seems to have verbal diarrhea -- he hardly takes a breath between sentences. He's an English teacher's worst nightmare, as he is the embodiment of a massive run-on sentence. You can ask him a simple harmless question like, "How was your workout?" Then you can relax, knowing that you'll never have to respond -- or even look at him for that matter -- he just launches, and talks, and talks, and talks. I've imagined people leaving the room entirely and wondering if he would notice.  So why am I sharing this? Well, to give him some credit, he really is a smart guy. It's just that he is a monologuer, a one-way communicator. He never asks questions. In fact, I can't recall him asking anythi...