Sorry, I got lost

So, looks like my best intentions have been nowhere to be found for the past *cough cough* two years. For someone who can neither stop talking or writing, it's hard to believe that I haven't done a single thing with this blog since 2006. The funny thing is that I noticed I had a saved draft of a post from April of 2007 right after I lost my appendix in Mills Peninsula Hospital. The post was titled "I just donated by kidney to science" and I'm sure it was hilarious but I guess we'll never know since the muse to write about it left me about sixteen months ago. I'm feeling particularly compelled to write these days. For one thing, it's shameful that I go through these pictures of my kids and see that since my last post the kids in these pictures look nothing like the kids in my house today. Oh yes, and there's one missing because our youngest is turning 2 in two weeks. Great, another reminder of how long it has been since I wrote anything.

I'm also feeling somewhat melancholy about lost connections and what I call "disconnected friends." These aren't the people in your life who you really don't know how to find. These are the people you know, you care about, you really have an interest in their well being, but you just haven't spoken to, seen, written, or generally heard about in far too long. I lost a friend last week. He was one of those disconnected friends although I had been fortunate to reconnect with him through work in the past year. He was young. He had a loving wife and two young children and he had a tragic accident doing something he loved and now he's gone. Mind you, this wasn't someone who I was especially close to, or whom I knew his wife and kids personally, or attended a wedding or bris or birthday party with. He was a guy who I met right out of college when I was working at Scholastic and he was an analyst an Robertson Stephens. I was young, naive, and doing a job for which I had no identifiable skills and he treated me with respect. When you're 22 years old and dealing with some interesting personalities on Wall Street, getting respect from someone you respect is a pretty cool thing. And so naturally I got thinking about him, and why I looked up to him. I thought about when I moved to San Francisco and he was here and he was always willing to take my call, offer advice, be a reference. And when he left the research side of the investment world, I don't remember if he said this to me or it was just my impression but I always thought he had the right attitude: If I don't love what I'm doing, then I'll find something else to do. I've tried to mimic that philosophy. Struggled to maintain some work/life balance when the reality is that I want a life balance where work doesn't interfere too much. And then I started reading what other people had to say about Keith, and it was extraordinary. Here was someone who touched so many people from different worlds and who all said the same things. And I found common connections through Keith that I didn't know existed. It motivated me to reach out to some more of those people who meant a lot to me when I was moving to California.

I realized that I haven't reached out to some of them since before I had children six years ago. I realized that I haven't spoken in person to any of my college roommates in more than a year. I have personal e-mails in my "follow-up" file that I haven't responded to for more than two years. I have no real reason to think that this time will be any different other than I'm older and I'd like to believe I have some higher understanding of the need to connect. But having the time to post and making the effort to post are two different things. I hope I'll use this blog more effectively to stay in touch with those disconnected friends and maybe inspire them to reach out to their own disconnected friends. I couldn't really care less about someone's status on Facebook (although it's always good to know that my 20 year old cousin is chillin' because that's information I can really use) but I do want to know that their kids are growing up. I want to know when their parents are sick. I want to know that they love their jobs and where they live or that they have to get out before they go crazy. And I want to stay connected. Life is not meant to be wasted or lost. I want to love what I do or find something else I can love to do.