Random Thoughts with Will

     In the fictional town of St. Canard, when there's trouble you call DW. DW, of course, refers to Darkwing Duck, the terror that flaps in the night, says "Let's get dangerous" (how often do you hear that on a kids show?) and the the titular character of the 1990s Disney cartoon   with the same name. There's one episode of Darkwing Duck in particular where Darkwing is sent on a mission  by an agency but is forced to begrudgingly go by the agency's manual instead of his normal, unpredictable ways. In the end, Darkwing Duck does accomplish this mission and did it "by the book" - by ripping the book up and causing a giant vacuum cleaner to explode. But I digress...       In the 1989 film Dead Poets Society , Mr. Keating (portrayed by the late Robin Williams) has his students start to read an introductory essay from a poetry book about how to rate or score poems. A few sentences in, he instructs his students to rip out the essay pages and th...

     At Baylor, all students are required to take chapel. For most students, this means taking 2 semesters of it. Unlike any other class at the school, chapel was not for a grade, but was only pass/fail. And really, the only way to "fail" was if you missed more than 7 chapel classes. In chapel itself, there was one rule that the leaders/instructors were really particular about: no electronics. If you got caught on your phone, laptop, tablet, you got kicked out and weren't marked present. Admittedly, I wasn't the biggest fan of chapel and thought the "be present" rule that meant no electronics seemed extreme, but by the end of college, I understood why they had that rule.      We're inundated with screens a lot. Phones, laptops, tables, televisions, and so forth. With all these screens though, we end up becoming so inundated with them that we sometimes lose track of our surroundings or what's going on. We may even "miss" what's going o...

     You know what's amazing? The way we can make incredible memories or have lasting takeaways from the most trivial tasks or minute assignments. At the very end of my sophomore year of high school, only one final exam stood between me and summer break: health. The night before, I wasn't the least bit concerned about passing or getting a good grade, but my mom still wanted me to study. Not only that, she decided that it would help if my brother and sister helped me study for the final that I had been the least concerned about (in hindsight, probably should have asked for help on the Spanish one...). When they walked through the study guide with me (which was a test bank), they were amused by some of the fake answers. One question asked about the causes of a heart attack, and a fake answer was "it just happens no one knows why" - and written that way, without any punctuation or capitalization. Another question asked about the best way to give CPR, which featured the f...

     Everywhere you look, people are always running out of something. Sometimes it's tangible, like food, water, gasoline, or toilet paper. Sometimes it's intangible, like excuses, luck, or patience. And sometimes, people run out of their two most valuable resources, ones that should never get wasted: time and money. But is one of the two more important than the other?      There's the cliche "time is money," and there is truth to that. We value our time, especially since time is a finite resource. If we're spending our time doing Activity A, we're not spending our time doing Activities B-Z. Naturally, people get compensated by employers for their time - and work, of course.      If we're to agree that time is money, does that also mean that money is time? Well, not really. Money, unlike time, can be an infinite resource. Money may be a finite resource in any given moment, but we can always get more money, such as by getting paid, collect...