I have spent more than half my life--all the way through graduate school--mastering the art of playing the clarinet. I am good enough to get paid to play clarinet in professional settings, even though I know I have a long way to go to compete with clarinetists like Benny Goodman or Richard Stoltzman.

Army/Navy. Duke/North Carolina. Lehigh/Lafayette. Harvard/Yale. Deerfield/Choate. Haverford/Episcopal. Tampa Prep/Berkeley Prep.

Rivalry games! These are the games where schools that respect each other have a competitive moment, face one another and, as Michael Buffer says, "Let's get ready to rumble!"

I was recently asked if I had any advice for incoming ninth grade parents, and that got me thinking about parenting advice in general. I know, trick question. You should never give unsolicited parenting advice.  Let me repeat that: Never give unsolicited parenting advice! Absolutely no one will thank you. I do, however, have some things I have learned over the past eighteen years, and thought I would share them more as “life lessons” than unsolicited parenting advice. You decide.

We live in a hyper-structured society. We use alarms, all use the same phone, drive on paved roads, go to work on a schedule, live in cities and suburbs organized on grids, progress through school year by year, followed by college, internship, job, etc.  So sometimes we need to break free from this structure and just get lost. For most people, "lost" has a negative connotation. We need to know what we are going to be when we grow up, we need to be able to always follow along in class, we need to have a life plan, it is considered weak to stop and ask for directions. Lost is bad. Everything with a purpose is good. But I think being lost is healthy sometimes, and frankly, relaxing.