I'm totally in a bored, self loathing mood tonight.
As I mentioned in the past blog, I'm in the not so great City of Scranton this week for a number of public open house meetings (more on that in a later blog).
We're through 2 of the 9 scheduled (painful) open houses -- no one has screamed in my face yet, so that is good -- and I'm bored out of my mind with nothing to do in Scranton at night except crash in my hotel room and watch DVDs.
To help cure some of the boredom, I did a google search tonight on my name (as I know you've probably done before) and I came across a sports article that I wrote for the University of Maryland's Diamondback newspaper back on October 6, 1997.
To put it simply, this was the seminal article of my life. ...
It was my writing of this article that "convinced" me that maybe my dream of one day becoming a sportswriter wouldn't be for me and that I would instead choose a different path.
The article was "No. 5 Maryland upsets No. 1 Old Dominion in field hockey" about Missy Meharg's (pictured above) Women's Field Hockey team.
To make a long story short, as I was literally writing this article, I decided to quit sportswriting for a long list of reasons (the pay sucked, my editor was a dick -- he was a decendent of Ralph Waldo Emerson and never let anyone ever forget it -- and because of my personality; i.e. I always ended up becoming friends with the athletes only to have many of these friendships suffer because I sometimes needed to write negative stories that they didn't want to read.) And they ended up hating me when they read the article. And I don't like people hating me.
While I took the fork that lead to me becoming a spinmeister and part-time paperboy on my blog, I still haven't seen the piles of money that I envisioned back in the day . I was hoping by now that I would at least have a small pile of money to swim in (ala Scrooge McDuck).
Have you ever had those fork in the road moments in your life where you don't know if you made the right decision? Discuss....
3 comments:
Yea orientation...lol! I would say my fork in the road was when I interned at a divorce attorney's office. Prior to that point I wanted to be a lawyer...after I worked for that bitch I wanted nothing to do with it. In retrospect, I should have worked for a number of attorneys (3 or so) and seen what other office environments were like. Ultimately, I wish I had gone to law school, but I guess it wasn't meant to be...
So which of these chics did you hook up with?
It's always a sad day when your dream dies...
But it doesn't have to. You can still be a sports writer...just a 21st century sports writer. In an era when ProFootballTalk is the main source for breaking news, the Talented Mr. Roto makes over a million dollars a year, and speculation is the soup of the day, the concept of the beat writer is old news.
One guy broke the Shawn Chacon story yesterday, but 500 people shared their opinion about it today. You can be one of those people.
Consider it. The dream should never die. It makes sense to chase the money, but it shouldn't come at the expense of the dream. If you ever want to start up something together, let me know. 2 lunatics are better than 1.
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