I don’t want to wait for 
Birthdays or earthquakes
To tell you how I feel.

So I will write out my heart 
As best as my blood and tears can manage,
Forgive me if I’m not always clear at times
Sometimes I’m not always clear at times.

I’ve written poems 
For a wife I do not yet have;
Stories for children 
Someday I hope to know,

But these are miles down the road,
Moons and suns away.
I will have to travel many paths 
Before I stumble across that one.

I’ve had to stumble across many paths.

I used to think I carried the world 
On my shoulders,
And that if I stumbled and let it slip 
Everything would come undone 
And crumble to pieces.

The thing is, I stumbled, and slipped, 
And I crumbled to pieces;
But you all were there to pick me up.

But you weren’t just some pick me up. 
Here today and gone tomorrow, 
Always wondering when you’d 
Make your way back into town like the circus.

You were there for me. 

From summer grill outs
Where we thought it would never end,
To midnight kidnappings, 
Frostie runs and driving for hours, 
A hundred games of madden, 
And cheesecake multiplied by three, 
Always baking in your kitchen, 
The Saturday brunches, 
And Monday night TV.

You were there for me. 

A thousand thank-yous 
And a million tulips couldn’t do my heart justice.

Out of two decks, 
I came up aces eight times over. 

So thank you, eight times over again. 

Well. That was quite the break. 

My bad. 

Turns out the last time I wrote something on here was February. And turns out I still can't spell February without the help of spell check. 

I'm an absolutely horrid speller. Without spell check, I'd be lost. Actually I was. There was about a month when my spell check didn't work on my computer. I had to either change everything I wrote to the vocabulary of a 3rd grader, or I had to google how to spell each word. I wasn't the most proficient typist back then. 

For a long time I was pretty self conscious about my spelling. It was kind of embarrassing. 

I also have very hairy legs. Another trait I used to be embarrassed by. 

The weird thing about my legs is, it's just them that are hairy. I'm not a hairy person. No back hair, minimum chest hair, stupid patchy facial hair. 

I once had a nickname of Mr. Thumnus. 

I sweat more when I know I'm going to be around a girl I like. True story. I also drop about 30 IQ points. 

Sometimes when no one is home I go into the bathroom, look in the mirror and test out new characters that I make up. A few nights ago I came up with a great substitute teacher. 

When I go to the bathroom and it's in close proximity to people, I'm very self conscious that they'll hear me peeing. Thus I try not to pee into the water. Then I get scared they'll think I am just in there looking at myself in the mirror or something. It's really a lose lose. 

Sometimes I think we take ourselves too seriously. All this stuff used to matter to me. I used to legitimately get worried about sweating around someone I liked. Or anyone actually, which only lead to more sweat. I used to hide my spelling tests at school and throw them away right away because I always used to fail them. I thought about trimming my leg hair to make it less noticeably overgrown like it is. (I still hate peeing around people so I won't comment on that in the past tense)

I think we've all got these things that we try to hide from other people. Things that we don't really want to let out because then people will see us and we know we are. Not all the cool stuff we try and let people see or notice. But guess what. 

You, you are a wonderful individual. With every single one of your strange, funny, weird, fears and quirks. You're wonderful! And I've found the more we actually open up the more we notice that we aren't that strange after all. And all these strange parts of us are actually pretty common. Including the peeing thing. My friend Jeremy Head has the same fear. 

You're not as strange as you think you are. And you're way more incredible than you do.