When the CPAs outnumber me — a CFA-sporting comparative literature major — by three to one, you can bet I’m not going down without putting up a good fight. When I ran my money management firm, I found myself in that very situation, huddled with our ops team, weighing the pros and cons of participating in a stock-lending program.

I’m not quite sure how I found myself watching the first few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation over winter break years ago with my older son, Haden.

Hands down, my favorite part of my former life as a stockpicker was getting to see how things were made.

Part of the job of a bottom-up stock picker is speaking to company managements and parsing facts from fiction. Back when I started in the ’80s public and investor relations didn’t manage communications as deftly as they do now. C-suite messaging is a lot more rehearsed and polished.

I may be a psychopath. This scary thought is not the result of discovering a bunch of unidentified body parts in the freezer, nor is it a consequence of my having flunked a Cosmo personality test in the supermarket checkout line.

In 2009, I began paying a lot of attention to tall and tattooed young men, thanks to my son Lucas’s newfound passion for basketball. Because of him, my lifetime professional basketball game attendance went up a mere 3,000% or so in six months.