I never understood why anyone wanted to be a fireman growing up. Was it the truck? The firetruck's unwieldy as fuck; only an 18-wheeler is even shakier to drive, but it makes a better explosion when it crashes into something. Was it the fire hose? That shit gets old pretty quick. Is it running into fires with an axe, beating the fire to death with it? Okay, that's pretty gnarly but there seems like there are better things one could be doing.
That said, I never wanted to be a fireman. When I was a wee tike (tyke? dyke?), I didn't even think about career shit. I was only vaguely aware of what my dad did (my mom didn't do anything at the time, career-wise). I had no idea what anyone else did. I probably thought the sisters were just there to teach me and crap. Whoa, does that mean I was unaware of their humanity? Food for thought!
The concept of "a job" probably never sunk in for me until 3rd grade. Don't be alarmed: I was a fairly stupid kid. Maybe one day I will regale you with the full width and breadth of my unbrightness (hint: It involves multiplication...). But at that point, as far as I was concerned, growing up meant doing whatever the hell you wanted to do. And for a long-ass time, I wanted to play BASEBALL!
Yes, America's pastime. It's the first sport I became aware of. Here's a bonus Adamtrivia fact for you: Despite my dad trying to make me a Mets fan, I became a Yankees fan because... I liked their color scheme more. Yes, not even the Mets appropriating Snoopy made me like them. It was all about mistaking navy blue for black. I guess I wasn't THAT stupid after all.One of the earliest memories I have is wasting time in Montessori school pretending I was playing baseball. I got in trouble a bit over that but I didn't care. I didn't even understand the sport. All I knew was someone would hit a ball around and people would cheer and the guy would run around. As time went on, and I naturally understood the sport a bit better, I still maintained the idea I would play baseball. I was spurned on by a somewhat successful little-league career and a few choice moments as a middle school baseballer. But by 9th grade, my interest in actually chasing baseball stardom waned (as did my actual chances of even sniffing a high school baseball team, much less the Marlins. But I repeat myself).
Sports stardom is still a pretty damn cool thing, and being a sports star is my fourth-highest ideal career choice. But until and unless they made MW2 an actual sport, that's not gonna happen. Alas, we always have the real thing.
Next up: sports broadcaster. I suppose it was a natural progression from the field to the booth. But why the booth?Well, think about it, genius. What's the only thing better than being paid to play sports? Uhhhh, maybe being paid to watch them? Yea!!! All the guys in the booth seemed to be having fun and learning shit all the time. You get to follow the team, maybe interview some players and stuff, maybe bang the mascot, the sky was the limit!
I was actually spurned on by this by doing some real-life play-by-play. BUT, this is a super mega secret. You are not ready to hear this secret. Don't ask. In time you may know, but not now.
Well it's technically not a secret, per se, but the fact is you don't know it so it's a secret to you and you don't know the proper channels to go through to learn it on your own. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha :coughs:
Midway through high school, I figured out something even cooler than being a broadcast dude: Being a cop! Yes, I was a sucker for the whole "upholding the law," "enforcing justice" shit. I also liked solving crimes because I figured it'd be like a puzzle, except with consequences YOU TAKE TO THE GRAVE.It helped that learning that Nassau County cops make like a quarter kajillion bucks a year, and they don't really do anything but sit by speed traps and play a game of Pull Over the Only Black Driver on Long Island. But as time wore on, being a Nassau cop didn't really appeal to me. I wanted to be a big city detective, like Richard Belzer, except real! Also I never watched L&O so none of those guys was an actual influence on me.
I still have a pretty strong sense of justice and I think that if I were given carte blanche to pop into bad guys' homes, yelling "BUST 'EM!!!", I could be a really great cop. But since that wasn't gonna happen, the desire to do this petered out shortly before senior year ended.
For 12 minutes, officially, I wanted to be Bob Ross' assistant. It seemed like such an easy job. Mix the paints, comb the hair, make sure he took his daily regimen of cocaine. But there was one critical flaw in my plan: He got died. Since his got dyingness, he was very much retired, and there's only one Bob Ross. And he's dead. There's probably like another Bob Ross, maybe some guy living in Altoona, but he doesn't paint. Well, he doesn't paint landscapes. Maybe he paints fences or something.By the way, I entertained this thought while fighting off a particularly nasty stomach virus. I ended up winning, don't worry.
The last stop on the job hunt path thing was being the plucky journalist. Deciding to be a journalist was probably one of the most grounded decisions I've ever made (the other: Spray-painting the word "FUCK" on one of the columns in the White House. It's still there as of 2008. Go take a look!). I was good at writing and very curious about the world around me and shit. So I decided to combine the two things that I knew for sure I had in me. Voila! Journalist.So I attended Hofstra (on a full scholarship... ladies...) due to its super-strong communications school. It worked out for me for a number of reasons, mainly by leading me down my career path, by opening me to some very interesting ideas about how the media works (even beyond journalism), and by getting me in close proximity to the sexiest goddamn reporter wannabe in the universe.
BUT. A problem arose. The actual work of journalism posed a problem. As I said in my book review of "Flat-Earth News," modern journalism is pretty much crap, at least commercial journalism. It's churn. I mean yeah, you can learn a lot of cool things while being a journalist, and your writing skills are really enhanced by being one. But you're also pressured constantly for deadlines. All day, every day, get the story in by the deadline!! I hate that shit, especially when you have to whip up some crappy little story and nobody is cooperating with your newsgathering and ugh.
That is not to say that I think I'm too goddamn good to be a mere beat reporter. But modern journalism is a constant grind to find shit that you're often resorting to, well, finding shit to work with. As an editor for a software newspaper, sometimes I read walls of text about software and all I can do is realize that a) at least 90% of it is actually PR shit, and b) it seems extremely trivial in the Big Picture.
I didn't quit on journalism. I just adjusted my perspective, and now I'm an editor. So now I can take the crappy stories (crappy subject matter, not necessarily the writer's skill, though... well, yeah) and make them at least readable. That's where my pride comes from. Yeah, I have very little of it but I'm proud of my small pride! I'M A PROUD MAN
I'm 72.9% sure that I'm set on my career. My main career, that is. One day I will pursue a side-career as a writer. I'll probably sell a grand total of 12 books. But I don't write for the money.
I write...
FOR THE WOMEN.
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