Saturday, April 11, 2009

The Intellectually Challenging Friend

The "Intellectually Challenging" friend keeps your brain working. She asks your opinion on current events and current issues and maybe argues a little bit on the details so you have to keep yourself well-read on things. Or she can take the opposite side to help you hone your arguments. She sends you articles and tells you about great new books. She volunteers with you on causes and and goes with you to lectures on issues. She encourages you to take classes and learn new things. She watched the news on the campaigns and the election and emailed you when various people were going to be giving speeches and discussed the details over lunch the next day. She can be counted on to send you the latest silly pop-fluff email forward but only with a sarcastic remark or biting debunking attached. If you are giving a talk or making a presentation somewhere, she will critique your slides or notes or even sit through the whole thing for you and offer gentle guidance on improvements. If you are stuck on researching something, she will give it a try, hoping her slightly different take on it will yield some additional results. When your family thinks you are a little nuts for caring about such things in such exhausting detail, you know you can count on her to get it.

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