Doors swing open, doors slam shut

One of the best things parents do for their children from the day that they're born is to lie to them. Regardless of race, age, social status, region or religion, almost every child with a parent present is told the same thing, "You can be anything you want to be."

We're all adults here, we know that sadly isn't the case. It's still one of the greatest things that a parent does for their child.

We get older, we find that we're just not suited for some of the jobs we want. Most obviously, you can work as hard as you want, but if you're five feet tall, you're never going to be the starting center for the Knicks. Now that Zeke is gone, you've also lost your shot at backup as well.

Life is full of smaller hurdles as well. Perhaps you really want to write the Great American Novel, but you can't keep thoughts in your head long enough to get a solid start on it. Maybe you'd love to be a high-powered Hollywood agent, but can't wrap your mind around numbers.

The point is that from a very early age, there are plenty of things that stand in your way between what you want to do and what is realistically available to you.

I've swung wildly across this spectrum from my highly idealistic days as a college freshman, where I felt that my post as the Burke Hall vice president could certainly lead to a better world for my fellow man (one pizza party at a time, I suppose) to heated discussions in my mid-20s where I passionately argued the point that "most people just do whatever job sucks the least."

While we can't all be the cowboy/astronaut/ballerina/princesses we'd dreamed of being in kindergarten, I think that part of growing up is realizing that the time, effort and sometimes money required to get from Point A to Point B in our professional lives just isn't worth it for a lot of us.

We find apartments we like in cities we like and hopefully marry a person we like and that's enough to keep us happy. Sometimes, we buy dogs. We're not drones and most of us settle out into areas that we enjoy on multiple levels, but if you were to sit down and sketch your top five careers you'd choose if the aforementioned time/money/skills, would the title on your business card be there?

Mine wouldn't.

This stems from course reading I'm doing this week to prepare for Thursday night's class as I begin the second semester of my adult education career. I need to map out my custom-crafted major with an eye on some greater goal. That can be grad school, a new job or pretty much anything else I choose. I tend to think that if I was goal-oriented, I wouldn't be there in the first place, but I'll play along.

It's not like they have the Big Book of Awesome Jobs open in the main office and you go down and pick one out. It does take time and effort and a desire to fight and work towards that goal to get to a place where you're doing a job that you wouldn't trade for anything in the world.

That seems to be the piece most of us miss somewhere along the line. Again, sometimes the effort honestly isn't equal to the opportunity costs. Why trade on the time and money you could allocate other places unless it's really worth it?

This is a bigger issue as we get older. In addition to the investment up front, there's always the possibility that you emerge on the other side and can't find anyone to pay you for your newfound knowledge and skill set. It's one thing to get your business degree and use it to leverage a better position or paycheck with the same company, it's quite another to be dumped into the job market with people who weren't in kindergarten when you were in high school.

However, some people are willing to take those risks and do something dramatic to shake up their station in life. For them, I have nothing but respect. For someone like me who clings to routine and familiarity, I can't think of many things that are more terrifying that chucking everything and forging out on a new course.

While I think I have the requisite courage to make moderate course corrections on my career path, I can't fathom the stones it takes to decide you're tired of being a bank manager and enroll in clown college the next week.

Still, I've been pretty content today to pore through course materials and wonder about what can be. While I have the lion's share of coursework complete for an English degree, it's been a satisfying exercise to stretch my legs and wonder what it would be like to strike out in new directions, regardless of their practicality or earning potential.

If you think of your career path as a hallway, it's not outrageous to say that doors are constantly shutting for a variety of reasons. You need to pay for daycare and dozens of doors that would have been really fun to walk through close. Your friend goes nuts with her cell phone camera on a long night for you and the political doors close. Just getting older closes its share of doors.

It's been interesting to go and reopen dozens of them today. What major do you pick to be the head coach of an NFL team? I think I'd like to give that a run.

(Image from: LSSU.edu)

Leadership lessons from Chef Ramsay

There are a few things I'm continually shocked by when we settle in to watch Kitchen Nightmares with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey.

First, is that when you set your TiVo, you get the Fox version - filmed in America for American audiences - and the BBC's original version and the differences are night and day. While Americans know the chef as a foulmouthed bully who has a thesaurus of scatological terms to describe the food people prepare, the British version is a different picture.

Instead of the usual bombastic entrances, punctuated with vomiting and belittling of the waitstaff, Ramsey enters the UK's hard luck cases and almost immediately begins the hand holding and sympathetic looks. It's very different and makes me shake my head at what American audiences either demand or have responded to in the past.

Second, is that amongst the drama, he has a pretty firm grasp of leadership skills and different approaches to problems with his staff. After countless hours spent in leadership retreats, seminars and training sessions, you start to see some of the usual suspects appear in his shows.

Ramsey employs a bit of verbal slight of hand in dismissing groups from the small meetings that take place mid-show with a quick, simple, "Yes?" It's positive, short and doesn't leave a lot of room for further discussion.

Ramsey will offer a rapid fire checklist of tasks (or sometimes wholesale changes that the owners may not be on board with) to rock people back and then shove them into action with that "Yes?" It's really pretty interesting to watch once you see what he's doing.

A new one I caught last night in the follow up show - where he returned to the restaurants from last season - is his urging that his newest protegees, "don't stop." It's a little thing, but it goes a long way from his position as a giant in the celebrity chef game.

It's nothing that will change your world view, but I'm betting somewhere in his home, Chef Ramsey has a dog eared copy of a book on how to motivate and inspire his troops. It actually makes me like the guy a little more.

Being a screaming loon can only make you so interesting.

Another day, another list

This morning marks the day that I turn 30 and as a trailer to last night's post, I offer these basics from three decades of accumulated knowledge:

* If there's any question about whether or not food is still good, throw it out. It's the same choice you'd make if offered the chance to dodge a 24-hour stomach flu in exchange for buying a new pizza/sandwich/gallon of milk.

* The preseason favorite is rarely there in the end. This is great news for 99 percent of the world.

* Sometimes simple things make all the difference in the world. One bad mood drastically changed my life years and years ago. You can't truly take back stupid things you say. You can't un-disappoint people once you've crossed that line. It makes no difference if you worry about these things or not, so it's best to just play the hand you're dealt each day and keep moving forward. By the time you see the impact, it's usually years later and much to late to change the outcomes.

* Bad haircuts will always grow back. Always.

* You can easily follow Major League Baseball 12 months a year.

* No matter how many times you tell your wife to quit reading over your shoulder and wait until you're finished writing, she'll never listen. You just need to get used to this.

* Never enter a casino with more money than you can afford to lose. While we're on the subject, gambling should be viewed as an entertainment expense and never any sort of investment. No, I don't care about your "system" for blackjack.

* It's significantly harder to reconnect friends once you've lost touch with them. It's surprisingly easy to stay friends with a call or two each month.

* There are two types of people when it comes to conversations. Those who listen and respond intelligently and those who are trying to tell a better story once you shut up. It pays to be in the first group.

* Always pay your bills on time. You cannot imagine the problems that are caused when you don't. Even when people make jokes on television about not paying their bills, they still do. Don't be fooled into thinking no one else is keeping up because of that.

* Self-control is one of the most underrated virtues in the human experience. Whether it's saying no to seconds or waiting a few months in order to pay cash for the new flat panel television, it is a very valuable trait that is worth the effort.

* Don't eat yellow snow.

* Nothing in life is free except for bad advice and a hard time from underpaid security guards.

* Some people need a hug as a motivator and some need a kick in the ass. Knowing the difference between the two can make you a very successful person in the world of business or professional sports.

* While it's trite, I don't remember much of the time spent driving out of my way to see or do something new because I was somewhat close, but I constantly remember those things I've seen and done.

* Once you start settling for things that you don't really want, it becomes a slippery slope. Try not to settle very often.

* Television news is for pretty people who aren't very bright but are very good at reading the newspaper in front of a camera

A short list of things in life for which there are no substitutes:

* Full fat ranch dressing
* The unconditional love from a dog you've raised from a pup
* The joy on your wedding day when the doors at the rear of the church open and you realize you've made the best decision of your life
* Second chances
* Friends you've had for longer than you can remember
* A cold beer on a July evening after working all day
* The feeling of limitless opportunity you feel as a 20-year-old
* New car smell as you leave the dealership
* Cable television
* Scoring the winning run/goal/touchdown
* Being there - spanning from a Civil War battlefield to Graceland to Wrigley Field, there's never a substitute for being there
* Hearing the door shut behind you on the last day of work at a place you can't stand
* Collapsing on the couch after you've moved the last box into your first apartment
* Meat cooked on a grill
* Day baseball
* Live music
* Finding the place in this world where you fit
* Bacon
* Central air
* Classic cars
* Spending an entire Sunday in a bar with your friends watching football and eating hot wings
* The first two days of March Madness
* Seeing your name in a newspaper byline for the first time
* The night your favorite team wins a championship
* True love
* True friends
* A good night's sleep

(Image from: Flickr.com)

It's been three decades, what do I have to show for it?

In a few hours, I'll technically turn 30, which isn't so bad now that it has arrived. Not that I thought it would be awful, it's just a strange, if arbitrary, milestone.

When all is said and done, I could easily run this into a marathon post, consuming hours of my time and ending up right back where I started. There has to be an easier, more entertaining way to handle this, not to mention the fact that most of my friends have already hit the milestone with little fanfare, crying or hospitalization for geriatric illnesses.

Why make a mountain out of a molehill, right?

It just brings to mind how many times I've seen an achievement punctuated with that familiar refrain of "before they were 30." Some people have made their first million by now, others have churned out works of art of unthinkable complexity and beauty.

I'm not in that group. I like to think I'm in the second group, who continue to produce throughout a lifetime in lieu of a jarring burst of brilliance.

Still, for 30 years, I've seen some stuff and done some stuff from the utterly mundane - I was potty trained - to the moderately bizarre - I have collected multiple concussions, including one from slamming my head into the bunk above me my freshman year of college.

Here's a small sampling, just to help me keep things in perspective. Plus, you never know what will happen in the future and I'd like to leave an easy roadmap for journalists of the future tasked with writing human interest stories when I invent something humanity simply can't live without or eat the world's largest steak.

In my first 30 years, I have:

* Worked in the locker room of a professional sports team.
* Stood at the 50-yard line at Lambeau Field and Solider Field
* Caught a foul ball, had one lofted to me in the outfield from a pitcher warming up and had one rifled above my head for annoying a visiting outfielder
* Lived in several major cities, including one on the East Coast
* Married a wonderful woman who still hasn't figured out that she's out of my league
* Helped people train their dogs at the Humane Society
* Learned more than enough trivia about my hometown to keep tourists busy at every stoplight in the downtown area
* Written for a handful of important newspapers and ran several inconsequential ones
* Peed in the Governor's bathroom at the Illinois governor's mansion (8th grade field trip)
* Dipped my feet in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans - this includes seeing the sun rise and set on both coasts
* Learned to work with my hands, be it inside a wall, under a hood or in order to build something useful
* Spent enough time behind a camera lens to take pictures that others can't believe I captured
* Fell in love and survived
* Fell out of love and survived
* Made major and minor mistakes and can still honestly say that I'm happier today than I have ever been in my adult life
* Hung around long enough to be respected for being intelligent after hiding from it in grammar school when it wasn't nearly as cool to be bright
* Ridden in a Model T Ford
* Emerged from my turbulent 20s with all my fingers and toes intact
* Visited over half of the 50 states
* Worked on several career paths - some I'd do again, some I'd do again if the money was better and some that I'd need powerful narcotics to get back into
* Learned that much of life revolves around balance. It's a strange lesson and one I'm still working on
* Learned that there is a time to sacrifice for your principles and it's rarely convenient. It's still worth it in the long run
* Learned to drive a stick shift vehicle without any major incident

(Image from: xmlgrrl.com)

Life with the Sickleys

One of the lasting reminders of the Florida trip has to be the lumps on my left arm that appeared after a day in the sun as we were leaving on Wednesday.

We assumed it was from the spray-on sunscreen I'd been using when we were at the pool or baseball games - it looked like a bad sunburn, except for the whole sunscreen thing - took some over the counter stuff and let it run its course.

Since then, I went to work Thursday and Friday and then headed home to Chicago this weekend to help my sister and her husband do remodeling work on their new home.

My arm started to look better until the drive back today, when it ran into the sun again and made my entire forearm take on the texture of a football again. So much for the sunscreen thesis.

Now, I hope that this case of Football Arm goes away in time and everything returns to normal, but I'm mildly concerned, especially in light of The Girl's ongoing battle with Pirate Eye.

Every so often, her eyelid will swell up and then the pirate jokes start. It's worth noting that he doctor she sees has no clue whatsoever about what is causing Pirate Eye. The frontrunner is an allergic reaction to something on her pillows, but so far, we can't narrow it down.

The botom line is that is she's allergic to sleep and I'm allergic to sunshine, we're in for a world of shit when we have little rugrats running around sneezing when they get too much oxygen or breaking out in a rash when they come into contact with wood.

(Image from: Germes-Online.com)

Up, up and away

I fly out of Minneapolis for Colorado Springs in four hours and have the usual antsy tics I get when I fly now.

For anyone who has spent even a few minutes with me, you see the immediate problems with these types of situations.

For starters, I hate waiting in lines when the delays are caused by people not paying attention or are unaware of the rules they're expected to play by. That never happens in a security line, right?

When the TSA rules change weekly and some chowderhead is yapping away on his cell phone or is letting their kids run free while they pick their nose in line, it bugs me to no end to stand behind them as they fish for metal in their pockets or their boarding passes that they've misplace in the 150 yards from the ticket counter to the security lines.

This is only compounded by the unfounded anxiety I feel when waiting to pass through the checkpoints.

I hate these things. I hate the fact that the only things standing between me and my flight (and my schedule) is someone who is bound by protocol for simple problems such as trying to take a lighter or pair of scissors onto a flight.

It's weird, I don't mind the flight itself, but I'm such a pain in the ass for staying on schedule and not getting held up by other people that the build up is just hell for me.

At least we're light years safer in the realm of air travel because of all this nonsense, right?

Right?

(Photo from: ISellColoradoSprings.com)