Don't Laugh, People

Lamar Odom has awoken from his coma, even muttering words and responding to questions, according to multiple reports today.

This comes days after Odom was found unresponsive from an apparent overdose at a Nevada brothel.

Addiction is a serious issue. It is easy for us to joke about drugs and users. We do it all the time. It is glamorized comedy on television and in movies. The sad reality is, thousands of people overdose and do not get the coverage Odom got. Many celebrities overdose and do not survive. We feared this for Odom, who has gone through a very public spiral in the last few years.

While I want to talk about the beginning of his recovery, I first want to start by addressing a few topics.

I saw the below video from Scott Van Pelt yesterday, and it hit home for me:


I too, saw the Bun B Tweet. I heard the remarks from Nancy Grace well before I saw the Van Pelt video. I had the same reaction as both. Lamar Odom is not "a Kardashian reality star." Lamar Odom was famous…

Every day I find myself asking this question because every day I find only a handful of people with common sense, if I’m lucky. 

Today I was sitting in a meeting with professionals, academics, well-educated people and yet they kept making simple things more complicated than they had to be. Mountains out of molehills, if you will. 

I classify myself as a well-educated person. I have a bachelor’s degree in science and I’m half way through my second degree. I’m always reading and learning to expand my knowledge and horizons. I have an ability to find simple solutions to other people’s mind-boggling problems, using common sense alone. I can never quite understand why it is that others cannot find these solutions for themselves. To me they seem obvious, glaring in fact. In my mind, the more knowledge you have and the greater your intelligence the more common sense you should have, but it seems the world doesn’t really work like that. When I’m dealing with people who have been working in a fi…