My Slider Was Terrible Anyway...

When I was younger I wanted to be a professional baseball player. This lasted until about fifth grade when a new kid joined our team that must have been 6'3 and could hit the ball 450 feet. At that point I realized, if I'm not the best player on my own little league team, I don't think I'm going to have much of a shot in the majors. It was a rough day.

Since then I'm pretty sure I've never had that thought again about anything. My priorities went from baseball to movies to surviving high school to drinking to girls to college to older girls to drinking to women. Never once have I had any thought to what my ultimate career goals were, and I'm guessing that's why I have my current job. Some people wake up when they're 12 and say they want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a stripper. Since wanting to be a starting pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, I've never once had an inkling to pursue a specific endeavor.

The strangest thing I've realized is that I'm not alone in this. There seems to be two types of people in this world, both having their own flaws and positive attributes...I've named them the Do-er's, and the MITS (making income to survive).

The Do-er:

A good friend of mine will be used as an example here, let's call her Judy. In high school Judy told everyone that she wanted to be a veterinarian. She had about fourteen different pets at home and would sometimes sneak a gerbil into her backpack and let it loose around the classroom. She wasn't very popular obviously, but I thought she was interesting for some reason, and have kept in touch with her throughout the years. It turns out she went to college to study medicine, then veterinary school, and now has her own practice. I just spent the past two weeks at my desk trying to put together a Rubik's cube. We obviously went different ways as you can see.

Now Judy has fulfilled her destiny and is doing what she loves, which is fantastic. I'm happy that she's happy and all that. But did she miss out on the past eight years of life just to fulfill her career dream? When I asked her about it recently, this is what she told me...

"I would be leaving the library at 1am on a Friday night in college and I'd see a group of drunk co-eds leaving the bar laughing hysterically. At times I would feel a hint of jealousy, but it went away almost immediately. Then I would go home and take a bath with my gerbils."

Okay, I made that last part up. So there you have it, fulfilling her dream made up for missing out on opportunities to partake in other activities. Although she did tell me that she had her share of fun here and there. And then she winked at me. It was a weird interview.

MITS's (making income to survive):

The majority of the people I know fall into this category. I fall into this category. There's nothing wrong about the people in this category as many of us will go on to be very successful and happy. We enjoyed college. Our major was usually in the business school, and could have been a foreign language, but was most likely business school. We're probably not doing anything related to what we studied while in college. There was no post-graduate studies for us. We took the first job we were offered out of college and haven't looked back. We often wonder if we would have gotten through college if there was no such thing as cheating.

We have a job that we probably loathe, but we do it because we have to. We need to make money to pay rent, pay the bills, get drunk, and take out a seemingly innocent girl from time to time. Our careers don't drive us, they're simply there because it's what we have to do in order to survive. Again, there's nothing wrong with this, we still contribute to society. We've simply always had too many other things going on to make a career plan.

We're consultants, salespeople, administrative assistants, IT managers, and accountants. Eventually we're going to get good enough at our job that some company will pay us more money than the last company, and we will go up the food chain. This will happen until we die or turn 60, in which case we will retire and live on nothing because our country is running out of Social Security. It sounds depressing, but we wouldn't want to have it any other way. I just wish that when I was 10 years old and someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, that I would have answered, "I want to crunch numbers." You never hear that dream...