I am away from my home on business, and there are no friends or relations near from whom to gain support. I?m in a place in which I ordinarily do not find myself. Let's call it Mars.

When you have time alone, it gives you time to be introspective. I haven't indulged in that particular pleasure in some time (as you can probably tell from the quality of my writing). Since it's late, and I'm expected in early tomorrow, I won't bore you with all the tedious details of this journey of self-discovery. But since this is a journal, I would like to share a few things I discovered while waiting for a pizza.

When I was a child, I had heroes. In my dreams, I wanted to be a crime-fighter. Publicly, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist from the time I was old enough to spell the phrase (about five and a half, if I remember correctly). There was a part of me that thought I could do both.

Later in life, I had more trouble finding heroes. The living people I had once admired had, one by one, proved themselves all-too human. The imaginary heroes took too much time and money to keep up with.

Are heroes important? Do we really need them? I think so. Heroes give us goals. They feed our imagination and inspire us to reach beyond ourselves. They cause us to ask ourselves questions from the perspective of someone else, someone we would be like if we only dared. And whenever we can find a way to become less egocentric, we have open a door to a larger world.

I said all that in order to say this; once upon a time, I had a desire to become the man my parents wanted me to be. Once I reached adulthood, I found out I had become someone I was not proud of, and would not have liked if I didn't have to share his limbs and organs. But, over time, things have changed. By the grace of God, I have become the man I had dreamed of as a child. I am a hero. And I am saving the world. Okay, so maybe I can't fly unaided, and I don't have anything out of the ordinary on my utility belt, and there isn't a cape on my uniform. Those aren't the things that make a hero.

"So," you say to the monitor, "tell us, Mr. Schmarty-Pants, what makes a hero?"

If you don't know, then you must not have one.