Daily Inspiration

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

-Aldous Huxley

When I grow up

For those of you who were hoping this would be an in-depth analysis of the song “When I grow up” by the Pussycat Dolls I am sorry to disappoint you – there will be another place and time to debate whether or not they say “boobies” or “groupies.”

This is about the seemingly endless question, “what do you want to be when you grow up.” As a small child this question seems to be a relatively practical inquiry. As soon as we had the ability to form sentences “grown ups” have been posing this question. I cannot vividly remember the first time I was asked this question but know that the answer likely changed dramatically from year to year and even day to day at some points. This is my assumption based purely on the rapidly changing answers I would get from Adrie and Jaiden the summer I watched them. On Monday Adrie wanted to be a garbage man, Tuesday she wanted to be a social worker and most days she wanted to be a princess; Adrie was three at the time mind you. Fast forward a little over a year later and she has now decided she wants to be a doctor!

I can remember being asked this exact question in third grade while be taped by Ms. Luce; apparently I wanted to be a Marine biologist! Guaranteed I had no idea what a marine biologist did, but what I did know was that my best friend Essie wanted to be one so obviously I did as well. From that point on I threw around the idea of possibly being a teacher, a doctor, an actress, then a teacher again, a journalist, then thought seriously about just marrying a doctor instead of becoming one, at one point according to my dad I wanted to be a minister’s wife with twelve children, then I was going to be a business woman in New York and then an actress a couple more times. My point being that as children and even young adults our minds were constantly being stimulated by the world around us both immediately and at large – we were influenced by media, peers and family. But my question is does that cycle ever truly stop? If it was supposed to I think there may be something profoundly wrong with me, because it is a daily battle for me to decide what it is I want to be when I grow up and I will be 24 years old in less than a month! Not a day goes by when I don’t question what it is I really want to do with my life professionally and how I am going to get there.

Today I am proctoring the ACTs for the umpteenth time and I find myself pondering this question even deeper. When I walk into New Prague High School I immediately feel like I am worlds away from being 18 and at the same time I can literally see the locker banks full of my then classmates shuffling to class and muttering their plans for the weekend, like a mental snapshot. I am not sure that I was in one particular social class in high school, I basically got along with just about everyone but I was highly aware of the caste system that existed within the walls of New Prague High School and even more indefinitely the barriers of New Prague itself. I am grateful that I was lucky enough to be a member of the in crowd versus the latter because it was undoubtedly a long four years for those individuals. And while I have been removed from high school for more than five years now, I am amazed how easy it is for me to categorize the students in this room right now. A very small percentage of the overall population of this school sits before me and still there is the smart ass, a brainiack, a prom queen, a tom boy, a class clown, a cheerleader, an athlete and an outlier. Regardless of their social standing they all came here today as an investment in their future, a stepping to stone to what they want to be when they grow up.

The irony of it all is that I still want to be an actress, a doctor, a journalist, a mother, a business woman and a teacher and the beauty of it all is that I can essentially be all these things if I chose to define those professions in a way that accommodates my talents and my life. If I look at the list above it is the overwhelming characteristics of each that stand out to me and those are intangible goals which do not require a degree. I am a caretaker (doctor) and highly dramatic (actress) by nature and arguably genetically. I am a business woman in progress. I do not need a classroom to teach. I will be a mother some day in one capacity or another. And as you read these words I become a journalist. It may be cliché but you truly can be all you want to be in this life.

I know that this list is far from complete and I truly hope I never stop evolving. I never want to lose the desire to reach for the next rung on the ladder. When I grow up I want to be a continual work in progress, I want to love and be loved, I want to live a life full of meaning, I want to be happy.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Daily Inspiration

"The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you're not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don't take it personally when they say "no" - they may not be smart enough to say "yes."

-Keith Olbermann
Broadcast journalist and host of
MSNBC's Countdown with
Keith Olbermann

Come September

Today is the last day of September. It is fall, my favorite time of year. And as much as I hate being reminded each morning that the days are getting shorter and that before I know it I will be standing in snow up to my knees cursing my fate having bore me in Minnesota, fall seems to intoxicate my senses with an incredible nostalgia. The crisp smell of fall air is filled with football games, ladies nights, karaoke, and endless pots of coffee. It is during this time of year when it seems like everything I see and smell reminds me of the years past. This fall seems to be particularly filled with sentiment however being my very official year out of college. They say that when people lose limbs they can suffer from memory pains for years; is it possible I am experiencing similar pains. I spent the better part of my twenty three years of life in school, but the four and a half I spent in college seem to have left a lasting impression on me.

I have only been a part of the corporate world now for five months and having started that journey in May, my first natural response to September is: school. Only this September came and is now gone and I am slowly realizing that it is really all over. I drove to work today in order to fulfill a volunteer opportunity with my coworkers. So typically I would be waiting for the bus for up to twenty minutes after work - but today I had the freedom to leave precisely when I wanted to – and then proceeded to wait twenty minutes in traffic fighting my way out of downtown. I didn’t mind however because I was able to crank the music and jam out in my own privacy; Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” happened to be the first of many in this evenings set. Not to say that the bus doesn’t have its own charm and entertaining subjects to ponder but that experience would fit under an entirely different set of feelings, something closer to “the crazies on bus number four and how incredibly broken our society is in so many ways” a topic I will surely be granting more attention to in the near future. But this was about something else.

As I slowly crept out of downtown, I found myself on University Avenue waiting at a stoplight just outside Dunn Bros coffee, and there it was staring me in the face both literally and figuratively - the past. To my direct left was the house my girlfriends lived in, to my right was the Essex’s boy’s house and in front of me was a mile stretch of memories. As I turned onto the newly re-opened 35W bridge, an already overwhelming experience knowing what had happened there only a year previous, I felt like I was being warped into the past. I had driven this route to the gym countless times but this was the first time I’d driven it for more than a year; even before I left for Rome. Rewind my life 18 months and driving to the gym would likely be a prelude to an evening out with my girls to one of many fine establishments including but not limited to Sally’s, Blarney’s, Library, Loco, Seven Corners and the like. And even if we weren’t going out we were sitting in our living room over looking Washington Ave shooting the shit and having an amazing time doing absolutely nothing. No matter how much we may have complained about homework and the certain limitations that come with being young twenty-somethings, we were having the time of our lives. And here I am today driving to the gym again only this time there will be no after party, unless of course you consider going to bed by ten in order to beat the corporate grind the next day a good time.

I guess what I am trying to say with this giant run on sentence is that I am deeply mourning my college days. And there is almost nothing I wouldn't give to rewind the clocks for one more night of it! The smell of fall brings it all back.