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My friend Pete committed suicide.

Pete had long struggled with demons. He had been hospitalized several times throughout his life for various reasons, all ultimately resulting from his bipolar or depression.

Pete was the first person I knew who had any sort of real emotional or mental disorder. Prior to meeting him, all of my understanding of depression and bipolar disorder was purely academic. As such, it was all too easy for me to dismiss these problems as just lack of will, or some other such shortcoming. "Just get over it," was the kind of thing I'd say, because I couldn't understand how anyone could not get over it.

Pete made real for me all the complexities of depression, and bipolar. I saw him struggle, saw him in pain, and I realized that there was something fundamentally different about him. His brain simply worked differently, and it was he who made me realize that some people really do need medication to live a so-called normal life.

During his manic periods, Pete was an absolute blast to be with -- we could spend hours doing anything and everything. He was creative, witty, and energetic. We'd drive around town, being loud and silly in his car; or we'd hang out in his room making stupid movies with his video camera; or we'd just waste time until we could watch Letterman. I don't recall ever being bored around Pete.

During his down periods, Pete was still an interesting person to be with. Brooding and morose, he was still an intelligent person, and we'd have long conversations about all manner of things. I tried hard through the years to show to him that I was here for him, in whatever capacity he needed. I tried to explain that he was important to me -- valued by me -- and that my life was richer for his presence in it.

After we graduated from high school, Pete went away to college, at Allegheny. I made a road trip out to visit him one weekend. It was a fun weekend, and Pete seemed well, though not great. The next year he came back to Columbus, and enrolled at OSU. He struggled, and eventually dropped out. He drank a lot of beer, and was generally a recluse. He increasingly spoke about killing himself, and made several plans to go through with it. I specifically remember a conversation I had with him at his apartment. He was explaining to me how unhappy he was, and how he wanted out from all of the suffering, and struggling. I looked at him square in the eye and said, "Pete, you mean a lot to me. I don't want to stand over your grave." I think maybe he thought this was a selfish thing for me to say, but it wasn't meant to be selfish at all: Pete made my world -- and therefore the world in general -- a better, richer place.

I saw Pete only a handful of times, after that. My job had me travelling a lot, and we slowly drifted apart. He didn't venture out much. I asked about him amongst my friends, but he'd pretty much pulled back from the world. Somewhere along the way -- some how -- he got married to a young woman from the class behind us at high school. I was happy for him.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the marriage didn't last long. I don't doubt that it must have been hard to be married to Pete. I found out that they never officially divorced, because Pete didn't have the stength to go to the courthouse to finalize the deal. Pete knew his limitations, and spent his entire life making a safe little nest for himself, from which he seldom ventured far. The divorce proceedings were too far outside of his comfort zone, so he never went there. He moved back in with his dad.

In the last years of his life, Pete began to venture forth, a little at a time. He contacted a few of the old crew from high school, and let them know that it was okay for them to call him. Tom invited Pete to a cookout one fine summer evening, and to everyone's surprise he showed up. That was the first time in almost a decade that I saw Pete. It was wonderful, even if I did make things uncomfortable by not knowing the details about his separation or the death of his mother the previous year. Pete was back, amongst the people who cared about him.

I invited Pete to the infrequent movie parties I hosted, knowing his affection for Mystery Science Theater. He joined us on several occasions, cracking jokes and making the entire evening more pleasant. I still marvel at what a delightful person he was.

I asked Pete to meet me for dinner one night, not long after my mom died. Knowing that he had lost his mother, I had hoped to sidle up to the topic of grief, and how to deal with it. I never really got around to it, because I was having such a nice time just reconnecting with him, one on one. He was honest, and open, and I saw the Pete I remembered from so many years ago. We laughed, and I think we both had a really good time. Then, the next weekend, Pete invited me to the movies with him and Jay.

And the next day he killed himself.

I'm torn. I miss him terribly, and I'm so sad that he felt that that was the only way to deal with his pain. I can't pretend to understand how hard his fight must have been. And in that sense, I'm truly glad that he's found peace, and is free from the pain and suffering.

I've been depressed in my life. I've had long stretches of unhappiness and sorrow and angst. I often marvel that I wasn't medicated as a kid because I was so often emotionally unstable. I also marvel quite often at how different my adulthood has been from what I expected when I was a teenager: I genuinely appreciate and fiercely value who I am today and what I've been able to do with my life.

I was the best man at my friend Scott's wedding, some number of years ago. As I stood with Scott on a small balcony in the final moments before we entered the hall, I was overcome with a profound sense of serenity. Through all the anguish and torment and frustration of my youth, there I was with a very good friend, sharing a special moment and the beginning of a new life for him. I remember quite clearly feeling saddened that I couldn't eloquently voice the feelings I had that this was worth the struggle. This was the joy and happiness and sublime, subtle reward for the struggles of an unhappy youth.

I can't imagine living in a world where that reward wasn't present, and might never be realized.

I miss you, Pete.

Today is International Day of Awesomeness.

The International Day of Awesomeness is a celebration of awesomeness. People are awesome every day, frequently don't realize it, and their feats of awesomeness are rarely recognized. We aim to fix that, with a special day to both perform and celebrate feats of awesomeness!

While slightly tongue in cheek, this holiday has got me thinking about awesomeness.

I recently canceled my landline, and had my home number ported to my cellphone. This is a perfectly commonplace thing to do, and so unremarkable within most of the communities in which I participate that I thought nothing of it. I failed to inform everyone I knew about the change though, and so a few folks kept trying -- and failing -- to contact me on my old cellular number. I ran into Amie and Duffy recently and found that they were two such people. I informed them of the number change, and they informed me of a discussion they had had about it. "I don't think you can do that," Amie had told Duffy, regarding the porting of my home number. "Of course he can! He's Scott!" was Duff's reply. What was commonplace to me was remarkable -- indeed, awesome! -- to others.

I'm fortunate enough to be friends with a bunch of really, really great people, all of whom are awesome in many ways. Much of the time, my friends don't truly realize how awesome they are. (Do any of us?) I could enumerate many of the ways each of my friends are awesome, but I won't, for fear of unintentionally leaving someone out and making them feel less than awesome. Suffice to say, I have awesome friends!

In no particular order, here's an incomplete list of other things that I think are awesome:

• family
• sunrises
• friendship
• spaceships
• kisses
• beer
• nature
• liberty
• Habari
• compassion
• Star Wars
• clean drinking water
• Discworld
• music
• naps
• sharks
• laughter

Feel free to share your own list of things which are awesome. And be sure to be awesome today!

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

-Illusions, by Richard Bach

It was remarked recently that friendship is the new capital. The implication is that people with few connections on social networking sites have less value than those that have lots of connections. I just read personal branding in a recession, and saw that the same sentiment was put forward there, as well. On the web, social equity is viewable through ... the amount of engagement you have on social networks. Quantity, not quality.

I strongly disagree with this idea.

First, I want to be very clear about my use of the word "friend". To me, a friend is someone to whom I will unconditionally give money. A friend is someone I'll go out on a line for. Someone I'll pick up in the middle of the night if they need a ride, no questions asked. It is someone in whom I can confide. I've long held a clear distinction between "friend" and "acquaintance," and the number of people I call friend is small. I'm careful not to refer to people as "friend" unless they truly are. If they're not a friend by my definition of the word, I'll call them a "buddy" or "a guy I hang out with" or some similar lexical indication of a casual relationship.

Following someone on Twitter does not make them my friend. To make the claim that someone with more followers is somehow a more "valuable" person is outrageous in my mind. In part, this is because I see friendship as a two-way street. I don't think it's possible for me to consider someone a friend (by my definition of the word) if they aren't capable or willing to reciprocate that relationship. In online relationships and social networking sites, the power users with thousands of so-called "friends" aren't really establishing friendships because the relationship is largely one-way. The social network power users aggregate and redistribute information, but what do they give back to the people from whom they glean the information they rebroadcast? Maybe a link? Maybe a "shout out"? That's not a very rewarding relationship, is it?

I think the fundamental issue here is the way in which folks use social networking sites. Some folks seek to use them for professional purposes, while others seek to use them for purely personal purposes. It's easy for people "doing business" on social networking sites to underestimate the importance of the social aspect of many of these sites and services, and to miss the point entirely on how they can be used to strengthen the bonds of real friendships. When using social networks for professional pursuits, quantity is important. Following a lot of people from which you can obtain information improves your chances of getting information worth sharing. But it can be a full-time job to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the people you follow aren't really "friends" are they?

I know that my stark separation of "friends" and "acquaintances" is not standard for most folks, and that's okay with me. It would be interesting, though, to see social networking sites offer some relationship indicator other than simply "friend". But I suppose terms like "leech" and "peon" aren't likely to get much use in a social networking site, are they?

We had one of our (in)famous movie parties this weekend. The format is simple: invite some friends over; cook up some food on the grill; have plenty of drinks on hand; socialize for an hour or two to get folks comfortable and in a good mood; then start some pre-selected movie. Everyone does their best to make everyone else laugh as hard as possible. It's similar to Mystery Science Theater 3000, except we're on Earth, and don't have robot sidekicks.

We've done this a number of times now, and always have a lot of fun. Notable standouts have been The Shining and Gremlins, and a surprise hit was Murder on Flight 502, which offered an enormous amount of spoofable material. I remember very little of the movie itself, but I remember quite a few of the jokes made that night.

This weekend we picked Jaws. Mike and Lauren, Jeff and Lisa, and Carina's new friends Martina and Michael all joined us. We decided to let the twins stay up with us to watch the movie. This resulted in a decidedly PG rating to many of the jokes we made, but it didn't detract at all from the fun we all had. It turns out that Lisa is quite the Jaws aficionado, and was able to really highlight a lot of wonderful absurdity in the film. It was a direct result of her quoting Roy Scheider's comment about the "bad hat" before he said it that we all began to observe just how bad many of the hats in the film really were.

The twins even got in on the lampooning with us, when they weren't covering their eyes from fear of the shark. No one can remember Tyler's joke, save for the fact that it was pretty good. Tayler stole the show, though, when she made her joke.

Best quote from the evening? When Roy Scheider shoots the tank in Jaws' mouth, as the shark explodes, Mike exclaimed loudly "Great shot kid, that was one in a million!" Jeff and I doubled over with laughter, Star Wars being the last reference either of us would have made.

These movie parties are always something of a mixed bag for Carina. She has a lot of fun, but it's easy for her to feel left out. Jeff and I lived together in college for a year. At that time Jeff was working at Blockbuster video, and would bring home free movie rentals almost every night. I watched a lot of movies that year. It was at this time, too, that I met and became friends with Mike. Movies served as a common bond between the three of us, and we shared a lot of jokes way back then that are still funny -- to us! -- today. Because of our history together, the three of us can be in stitches by only saying a few words: we'll start a joke, the others will remember it, and we'll all start laughing. Or one of us will make a comment about a movie, and the others will make observations about that movie by referencing some other film. This is, understandably, a little annoying to Carina, who sees us speaking in sentence fragments and then falling over with laughter; or who lacks the familiarity with the movies we've seen to understand why we're laughing.

Before this most recent movie party, Carina spoke to me quietly saying "Just break away, at least a few times, from that thing you guys do!" It was hard, sitting on the far end of the couch, watching Mike and Jeff speak in sentence fragments and quotes from movies. I couldn't bite my tongue all night, though, so on more than a few occasions I joined in, leaving Carina wondering what on Earth was so funny.