I’m moving into my first real office in a few days. Real walls. Real door. Even a real window. Before the furniture arrived yesterday, I’d often walk over to the building, slip into the empty room, and close the door. It’s a small space, roughly 10 feet by 10 feet, but it has a great urban view. The Sears Tower is mostly blocked by another imposing but lesser-known high rise, but it’s there. A sliver of its side and its gleaming white antennae peer over the neighboring buildings.

I wish I could stuff this entire space—the view, the sounds, the smell—into a care package and ship it to my teenage self in Alabama circa 1995. It would have been comforting to know that future me was quietly holding this place like a sweater thrown over a chair, waiting for me to make my way to the big, liberal, gritty city of my dreams.

I’m already certain that this office will be my Fortress of Solitude—my own little sanctuary where I can shut out the world as needed. It will compensate for every wrong ever done to me. It will erase every stray mark of teenage insecurity. It will recharge me. I will become an iPod and it, in turn, shall become my docking station.

When the furniture was set up a few days ago, I went over and sat in my shiny new chair. Everything is adjustable. There are levers and knobs to adjust the armrests, seat height, lumbar support, and resistance level of the back rest. After I’d tested a few different configurations, I looked out the window and wondered how long this feeling would last.

The feeling lasted roughly another ten seconds. Then, I started thinking about the potential negatives of this new career milestone. How long will it be before my department is moved again and my beautiful office is taken away? If I bring lots of stuff to decorate the room, how will I get it all home? And most importantly, is there any point in decorating a space with a drop ceiling?

Then I remembered that Oprah would not approve of this. Oprah would say I should remember my spirit and live my best life. She’d remind me to be fully present in the moment (and to sign up for two years of O magazine for 70% off the newsstand price!). But then I remembered that Oprah probably has an office with a fireplace and a private toilet that converts her waste into rosewater-scented candles.

Living in the moment is hard, and it’s especially difficult when you get something you’ve always wanted. But I’m going to try. And whenever I look around my new office and wonder, “What now?”, I’m going to remind myself that this moment has been 29 years in the making and it deserves to be savored. I have a door and my name is on it. And if 14-year-old me could stop by, I think he’d be proud.

My best friend has been saying for years that he wants to join the Peace Corps. He’s probably the only person I know who struggles with a sense of restlessness even more than I do. He’s always looking for a new adventure, and those adventures often take the form of a new boyfriend, a new place to live, or a new job.

When my friend’s house burned down almost a year ago, he asked me if I thought it was a sign from God that he was meant to join the Peace Corps. All his possessions had literally gone up in smoke. He was no longer on the hook for a mortgage on a house he hadn’t been able to sell. His excuses for staying where he was were destroyed along with his grandma’s collection of Fiestaware, which I assured him was the gayest thing his insurance agent would ever see on a single man’s claim paperwork.

After the fire, he signed a lease that he could easily break if needed and began working on his Peace Corps application. Several weeks later, as he was wrapping up his personal essay and preparing to round up recommendation letters, he got a call. Someone at the Social Security Administration had finally gotten back to him about a high-paying job he had applied for months ago on a whim. And they wanted him to come in for an interview. Immediately.

The job offer came a few days later. The money would be good. Not six-figures good, but still 50% more than he was making at his current nonprofit job. We discussed the pros and cons over and over until there was nothing left to analyze. He took the job and called me every day to tell me how much he loved it. But every time he described what he loved, he’d rarely refer to the actual work itself. He focused on future perks that he’d been promised—like the opportunity to relocate, work from home, and climb the government employment ladder.

Within two weeks, he called to confess that he was miserable. He couldn’t spend another day in a windowless cubicle farm poring over medical records searching for signs of fraud. His government I.D. badge felt like a noose every time he put it on in the morning. He didn’t talk to anyone at the office. He stared at a beige wall all day and read and typed and typed and read. He felt the clammy hand of mediocrity slowly tightening around his throat, molesting him, touching him in the bad place. He wanted to blow his mediocrity rape whistle before “the man” robbed him of his specialness and numbed him to the wonders of the world. Things were getting far too real and he just couldn’t take it any more.

None of that sounded good to me. But I also knew that like me, my best friend has a tendency to turn every moment of his life into some type of Hollywood movie plot cliché. It’s important for us to relate our life experiences to something we’ve seen on TV. If someone sweeps us off our feet, our minds drift to scenes from Pretty Woman—but with a gay guy waiting on the fire escape while Richard Gere climbs up with flowers in his mouth. If work is boring, then we need to move to Paris just like the characters in Revolutionary Road dreamed of doing.

When I saw photos of the charred remains of my friend’s house, I was fascinated with some of the stranger objects that the fire consumed: a mattress stripped of everything but its squiggly metal frame, the plastic casing around a television wilted and wrinkled like an overripe orange. Everything burns. And all that’s left are saggy lumps that loosely resemble what once was. Initially, that’s a real downer. But perhaps it’s only sad because the lumps don’t look like anything in magazines and so we’re clueless as to how to appraise their value. Nobody brings a pile of broken, blackened Fiestaware to the Antiques Roadshow.

Maybe time slowly burns away our delusions of grandeur, pulling us out of movie-reenactment mode and forcing us to live an original life that, on the surface, seems uninteresting. Maybe that’s the greatest challenge in aging gracefully—coming to terms with the lump that’s left when time spoils our best-selling-memoir-worthy plans. We’ll never be geishas who fall in love with wealthy CEOs, and we won’t hide in attics to avoid being captured by Nazis. So now what? Do we stay in a soul-crushing job because the economy is in the crapper and mom says we should be thankful to have a job at all? Or do we set sail for a third-world country because agreeing with mom scares the shit out of us?

Perhaps there’s a third option that involves pissing mom off a little without getting malaria or parasites. But until I figure out what that is, I’m advising my friend to do something completely original—like move to Paris with a Russian artist so that the real love of his life can follow him there and finally find the courage to say, “I love you.” Or he could drive cross country with two sassy drag queens to compete in the mother of all drag pageants. (Just think what might happen if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere!) Whatever he chooses, I’m sure the results will make for a great movie.

I’ve always thought of my dad as a simple man. He loves to hunt and fish, he loves his guns, and he loves a good fart joke. Sometimes I think heaven for him is a tree-stand overlooking a field of 16-point bucks on one side and a Nascar track on the other.

My dad always says he doesn’t live to work, he works to live. As a kid, I always thought this was sad. Then I grew up and realized that it’s very hard (if not impossible) for me to find a job I truly love. And it’s especially hard to be passionate about any job after its new job smell begins to fade. I was talking to my dad about this tonight, and he said, “Coming to terms with a mundane job is like teaching yourself not to be ticklish. It requires mental fortitude.”

I really love the idea that while we’re working at a mundane job, paying off our student loans, and trying to get our shit together, God is constantly poking us in the armpits, trying to distract us until we can’t take it any more. So we give in to our restlessness, give up the good thing we have, and go in search of a more glamorous calling that will probably pay less but be just as frustrating. My dad, on the other hand, has chosen to stick it out with the most lucrative job he could tolerate because it has allowed him to provide for his family and make the most of his free time. It still sounds a little depressing, but I’m starting to think there’s something to be said for mental fortitude, especially if non-ticklish people get to retire sooner.

When I went to graduate school several years ago to get an MFA, I thought being a professor would be the best job in the world. No being chained to a desk all day, summers off, and a job title that my friends and family would finally understand and respect. Of course, I also I thought it might be nice to help people learn, be a mentor to my students, yaddah yaddah. Along the way, I got sidetracked by a career that has kept me in academia, but on the staff side. Now I find myself in a comfortable routine. I can take a vacation whenever I want, my boss adores and appreciates me, I like my coworkers, and I rarely have to do anything unpleasant.

The only major downside to my current job is that there isn’t much room for growth. For the first time in my life, I’m not sure that I want my boss’s job, which leaves me wondering what’s next. When I began working in my current position, I jumped through countless hoops to get someone at the university to let me teach. At the time, I still thought teaching might be a great gig. Now, having worked closely with faculty for a few years, I’ve seen many of the less appealing aspects of the job—nasty student evaluations, colleagues with massive egos, the pressure to publish, and last-minute changes to teaching assignments that force instructors to become overnight experts on subjects they don’t like and don’t fully understand.

Now that I’ve survived my first year as an adjunct, I find myself questioning the pros and cons of becoming a full-time faculty member. I had hoped I’d have a few more years of part-time teaching to weigh the benefits of my current job against the joys of professor-hood. However, it looks like an offer for a full-time teaching position is going to come sooner than I had planned. Obviously this is a good problem to have, but it also means I need to hurry up and decide if I want to chase the thrill of the new or embrace the peace and predictability that come with my current job.

I figured while I was taking the time to make a list of pros and cons, I might as well exploit my friends (and complete strangers) for free advice.

Professor Job Pros and Cons

• Pro: working 33 weeks per year, off Thanksgiving to New Year’s and all summer (optional)
• Con: can only take off when school’s out
• Pro: room for growth and advancement, multiple options (tenure, dean, admin)
• Con: must exhibit work and/or publish research regularly
• Pro: having my own office and a more prestigious title
• Con: no division between work and personal life, very busy when school’s in session
• Pro: working directly with students; advising and mentoring would be rewarding
• Con: being evaluated and criticized by 90 students three times a year

Current Job Pros and Cons

• Pro: seven-hour work days
• Con: must sit at a desk all day
• Pro: six weeks off per year
• Con: can’t travel for extended periods of time (two, maybe three weeks max)
• Pro: low stress, low pressure
• Con: only growth opportunity is director-level job at another school
• Pro: able to teach part-time for additional pay (around $4200 per 11-week class)
• Con: teaching one class on the side leaves no time for other interests
• Pro: enough free time to take advantage of free employee tuition or pursue hobbies (although this would probably also be true of teaching after surviving a year or two of hell)

One last thing I should point out is that becoming a full-time professor would probably mean about a $10,000 pay cut if I only teach three quarters per year. However, I’d probably wind up a few grand ahead if I taught over the summer, which would still leave me with seven to eight weeks off per year. So, fair reader, what would you do in my shoes?

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I just got back from a conference at Princeton University and I was completely blown away by the beauty of the campus. The grounds feature many different architectural styles, but the overwhelming number of beautiful graystone Gothic buildings was what impressed me most.

Walking around the campus made me remember how much I always wanted a PhD from an ivy league university. Then I remembered I’d probably have to take the GRE 15 times to get a Princeton-worthy score. I also remembered that there’s no subject I like enough to want to write a 200-page dissertation about it. And even if I could stand to write a dissertation, what then? What would a PhD possibly allow me to do that I can’t do already?

Once I had talked myself out of getting a Princeton PhD, I stopped by the university bookstore and spotted a brown T-shirt with Princeton spelled out in orange, collegiate-style letters. In that moment, I wondered if I could become the first student in history to pursue an ivy league PhD based solely on the appeal of the university’s branded apparel. Is that shallow? Sure, but if I’m going to devote four years of my life to a degree that’s mostly for show, I’ll need to remind people of my intellectual superiority as often as possible and I’ll need to look good while doing it. I hate maroon, so Harvard’s out. Forest green does nothing for my pasty complexion, so there goes Dartmouth. Cobalt and Navy blue are far too common, so that eliminates U Penn and Yale. (I don’t want anyone to spot me from across the room and think I went to Duke, for heaven’s sake!) Of course, there’s always Brown University with its namesake signature color, but I refused to support an institution whose founders believed brown should be paired with Coca-Cola red. Columbia’s bluish-purple or Cornell’s fire-engine red might work when I need a gym outfit that says, “I’m thinner AND smarter than you.”

Yet, in the end, there’s just no substitute for Princeton orange. Now if I could only find a subject in which I could feign an all-consuming interest for several years and compose an admissions essay that makes no mention of my admiration for Princeton’s wonderful selection of well-designed hoodies, T-shirts, and sweatpants. In the mean time, I plan to keep myself motivated by repeatedly trying on my Princeton tee until I’m convinced it looks appropriate enough to wear on Oprah. However, unlike Kirstie Alley, I won’t make things more awkward by incorporating a flowing silk remnant from the clearance bin at JoAnn Fabrics. If that fails, I’ll just steal one or two of Bill Cosby’s honorary doctorates, assuming he wasn’t already stripped of them when he started doing commercials for Jell-O brand pudding snacks.

When I was younger, moving was a miracle cure. New surroundings provided a temporary sense that I was moving forward. I told myself I was leaving everything behind that couldn’t keep up with my insatiable appetite for an extraordinary life. At 15, when I was tired of living with my parents, I moved to a boarding school 300 miles from home. When I was tired of attending college in Alabama, I studied in France. When I got tired of that, I moved to Germany. I eventually moved back to Alabama, but got restless within a year and moved again for grad school. After grad school, I packed up for Chicago.

A change of scenery instills everything with a temporary sense of wonder. This is especially true when traveling abroad. A routine trip to the grocery store is filled with foreign products to ogle, foreign packaging to read, foreign music to bob your head to with foreign lyrics to ponder, and foreign shoppers to study as they push around foreign babies spouting foreign baby babble from the seats of foreign grocery carts. Even the mundane (and often distressing) act of paying for your groceries offers foreign expressions to master, foreign customs to observe, and foreign money decorated with foreign faces that beg to be caressed and held up to the light like treasure from a sunken Spanish galleon.

Eventually, however, friends or family or significant others begin to tie you to one place and it becomes harder and harder to simply pack up all your shit (which no longer fits in the back of a Civic hatchback) and go prospecting for wonder in some untamed frontier. As a result, your hunger for change is forced to find a new outlet, which often manifests itself as an urge for a new boyfriend, a new job, or a new condo across town.

The problem is eventually your city, boyfriend, job, and condo reach a critical threshold of amazing-ness. They become as good as they’re ever going to get, and further tinkering will only yield a result of equal or lesser value. Unfortunately, I think it’s hard for most people to recognize when this threshold has been reached. (See exhibit A: Jocelyn Wildenstein.) That’s not to say change just for the sake of change is always bad. It’s just important to be aware of what you’re really trying to get away from and what you’re really running toward, lest you wind up disappointed and full of regret over what you can’t get back. My thesis here isn’t to advocate that we all accept that life has to become increasingly mundane over time. I’m primarily trying to point out that when we stay in one place, we tend to apply the term mundane to more and more things that, at one time, held a certain sense of wonder. So, if we could just find a way to recapture that wonder—to see our next trip to Sam’s or Super Target through the eyes a North Korean exchange student, for example—we might not feel compelled to fuck up the good things we’ve worked so long to get right.

Just think about how intriguing everyday American life is the next time you’re staring at a bottle of Ms. Butterworth’s. She’s a giant woman full of syrup that pours out of her head and, according to her ad campaign, that bitch can COME to LIFE (despite repeated, prolonged exposure to microwaves).

There’s something oddly sexual about the whole thing—that raspy voice, the repeated references to her “taking her own sweet time” and being “thick and rich.” Is this a script for a maple syrup commercial or a new Lil’ Kim single? But I digress. The bottom line is, before you dump your boyfriend or quit your job or move away for no good reason, ask yourself if you’ve fully tapped the low-hanging wonder all around you. Then ask Mrs. Butterworth. That bitch knows her shit.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether or not each of us has a calling. Oprah assures me that we do, and it’s a lovely idea in principle. It’s comforting to imagine that everyone has a unique purpose, but it also seems painfully idealistic. Is anyone really “called upon” to be a waitress or run a dry cleaners or scrape road kill off the highway? Sure, it’s honest work and someone has to do it, but these aren’t the jobs that come to mind when people talk about finding your life’s purpose. And even the prestigious jobs titles we all romanticize are never quite as rosy as we imagine them to be.

I went to grad school because I thought the life of a college professor would be a great fit for me. I like to be master of my own little domain while still being a part of something bigger, and I like hearing myself talk. Helping people is great, too—especially if I get to be bossy and holier-than-thou in the process. Teaching my first class this fall has been a great learning experience, and there are a lot of aspects of the job that have lived up to my expectations. I already have a tiny fan club of eager students who seem to think I’m hip and dedicated and brilliant. Yet, the job also comes with many drawbacks that were to be expected: unmotivated students who don’t come to class and don’t do the work, needy students who require a lot of personal attention, and project grading that always takes longer than expected.

Being forced to view my dream job without the rose-colored glasses has left me wondering what really defines a calling. People who love their jobs often say bullshit like, “I’m excited to get to work when my alarm clock goes off.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I can barely be coaxed out of bed by a piece of bacon on a string. The thought of any job being so satisfying that I’d prefer it over sleeping in is completely laughable.

If I can’t have a job that I’m happy to get out of bed to do, the next best thing is probably a job that I feel compelled to do even when I don’t feel like it. For now, teaching seems to meet that requirement. I find myself thinking a lot about how I can improve my class. When I’m in over my head, at least I know I’m learning and growing. Unfortunately, this won’t be the case for long. Teaching will get easier and the pay won’t change much, and I’ll be left (again) wondering what’s next.

I’ve been incredibly spoiled by past jobs in which I’ve been promoted very quickly. Now, I expect new responsibilities and new perks (e.g., more money) every year or two. I get the feeling that this a problem for a lot of my friends—they’re mostly type A personalities who require constant, measurable growth. I don’t think any of them have found their callings either, and I’m not even sure that such a thing exists for all of us.

As a kid, I was always afraid of becoming too much like my dad, who always said he worked during the week for the life it afforded him on the weekends. The thought of working for the weekend still depresses me, but it feels more and more like an inevitability with each passing year. Another birthday or New Year’s Eve goes by and I still haven’t retired or published a book or found a job that makes me jump out of bed, excited by what the day might bring. All of this reminds me that my life isn’t on some exceptional trajectory that makes me different or better than so many people who have come before me. Coming to terms with your own mediocrity is a bitch. Thankfully, I have a few years before I turn 30, which is when—as we all know—all of your youthful, naïve dreams must officially die. In the mean time, I just hope that I don’t waste time searching for a calling that was right under my nose all along.

I’ve been a bit neglectful of the blog as of late, largely because I’m preparing for my very first day as a college professor. Yes, you read correctly. The state of affairs in American higher education is finally so desperate that even I have been entrusted with the power to shape our most impressionable young minds. When I picture my first day in the classroom, I imagine it being a lot like that Simpsons episode in which Homer teaches a class at the Springfield Education Annex. (I searched all over for a short clip of him running red lights and shouting “Can’t talk now, I have a CLASS to teach!” Alas, I could only find this longer clip that takes a while to get to the good part.)

I don’t have the time or the patience to actually write multiple paragraphs about any one topic at the moment. So, I thought I’d just provide a completely random assortment of updates and talking points.

What I’m Reading

I’m currently reading Stumbling Upon Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. One of the early chapters includes a fascinating look at frontal lobotomies. Apparently they used to be a popular way of treating people with anxiety disorders because the frontal lobe is the portion of the brain that allows us to think about the future. I was surprised to find that many people who lose the use of their frontal lobes can actually still function quite well in society. (I always thought they just became drooling zombies who needed constant care…although I guess that would mean the only reason someone would get a lobotomy would be to make them less of a hassle for the psych ward workers who have to take care of them.) In any event, the book had me hooked for several riveting pages, but the tone of the writing took a very bombastic, scholarly turn by Chapter 2 and I’m already searching for a new read.

What I’m Watching

I’m currently in love with Damages on FX. This show has taught me that being a lawyer isn’t about helping people and finding justice…it’s about killing witnesses’ dogs to keep them from snitching (the witnesses, not the dogs) and using the legal system to bend people to your will. At the end of every episode I wonder, “Did I miss my calling?”

What I’m Buying

It’s probably a bit un-PC to say that I’ve finally decided to “buy” a maid, but I couldn’t think of a more fitting verb to use in the title for this section. (”What I’m Employing” sounded even more clunky and equally dehumanizing.) If you don’t already have a maid, you simply MUST get one, dahling. And if you can, find a delightfully thorough Eastern European gal with a strong back and a keen eye. Mine could scrub graffiti off a Soviet tank with a bit of spit and a Taco Bell napkin.

The best thing about commuting via public transit is that it encourages me to read. Reading on the train offers two key benefits: it makes me sound smarter at parties and it reduces hobo-related harassment (especially since I started covering my book du jour with a homemade jacket that reads The Perfect Crime: Why No One Misses a Dead Bum.)

Since my big move to Chicago, I’ve been obsessed with career-guidance books. Here’s an overview of my latest reads:

Title: What Should I Do with My Life: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question
Author: Po Bronson
Summary: This book provides a ton of personal accounts from people who are desperately trying to find their callings. Some of them don’t have very happy endings (or endings at all), but most of them are neatly tied up and somewhat comforting. There seemed to be a lot of stories of people fumbling through professional purgatory, going to school for the wrong thing, realizing their dreams late in life, etc. So, if you’re looking to add a little schadenfreude to your career-crisis reading list, I give it two thumbs up.

Title: Grindhopping: Building a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues
Author: Laura Vanderkam
Summary: This book reminds me of that episode of Will and Grace in which Jack keeps repeating his workout catch phrase, “Stake it.” The author seems a bit desperate to be credited for coining the term grindhopper, and she promotes it through constant, merciless repetition. For those of you who aren’t already using in your everyday speech, a grindhopper is someone who refuses to be tied down by a traditional 9 to 5. They quit their day jobs to make bedazzled guitar straps for rocker chicks. They start multi-million-dollar candy manufacturing companies with two dollars, no knowledge of candy manufacturing, and a lot of tenacity. In short, they’re young and they’re more successful than you, and it’s all because they don’t let the man and his old-school rules determine how they should define work.

This book showed me that all I need to do to have the career of my dreams is to stop making excuses and get out of my own way—which I would totally do, but I just have so much going on right now. There’s those six episodes of Star Trek: Voyager on the Tivo that must be watched before they’re deleted to make room for some house-flipping show. And, let’s face it, my new granite countertops aren’t going to seal and polish themselves. But seriously, once those things are done, I’m definitely going to learn how to make croissants and open a bakery called Sticky, Tender Buns…or perhaps I’ll call it Don’t Bring Your Brats in Here You Damn Hippies Who Don’t Beat Your Kids or I’ll Punch Them in Their Chubby Little Throats.

Title: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It
Author: Barbara Sher
Summary: When I stumbled upon this book at my local library, I wanted to cry. ‘Finally,’ I thought, ‘Someone wrote a book that speaks to both my inflated sense of self-worth and my constant fear that every decision I make is wrong.’ There was even a chapter in which Babs promised to show people with too many interests how they could pursue all of them in a single lifetime. First, she told me to make a list of all the things I wanted to be BEFORE reading any further. I was intrigued. I hastily wrote down my greatest ambitions and turned the page, expecting something revolutionary—like a recipe for that elixir of life Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn drink in Death Becomes Her. Sadly, there was no recipe. She just told me to identify all the things I could do as a hobby or as a temporary vacation from my day job and—poof—now I could magically do them all. I suppose the book did help me prune a few interests that don’t merit full-time pursuit. But it’s clear to me now that if I want self-improvement claptrap with a hint of the supernatural, I’ll have to join Tom Cruise’s book club.

Title: The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
Author: Timothy Ferris
Summary: I really liked this book at first. The author makes some good points about how younger workers are more interested in flexibility and stimulation than salary and stability (although he’s hardly the first person to document the phenomenon). He’s traveled the world doing bizarre, glamorous things that read like a straight bachelor’s fantasy resume. At 29, he’s skied the slopes of the Andes, won a Chinese kickboxing championship, raced motorcycles in Europe, acted in a hit TV show in Hong Kong, and danced in tango competitions in Argentina. Throughout the book, he points out that you don’t need millions of dollars to do the things you’ve always dreamed of doing. More than anything, you need the flexibility to work when and where you like. Things were going great until the book recommended that, in order to determine what I should do with my life, I should make a list. I haven’t opened it since.

I have a lot of hang-ups that prevent me from feeling content in any job. For example, I have completely unrealistic expectations of how long it should take me to make my first million, and I blame HGTV. Every time I tune in, some mildly retarded, chubby straight guy is making $100,000 a week by following these simple steps:

Step 1: Purchase architecturally bland home in need of repairs.
Step 2: Promote open house before establishing realistic timeline for repairs.
Step 3: Predict financial ruin upon discovery that home is infested with termites or feral cats or heroin-abusing, pre-teen orphans.
Step 4: Combat infestation with several coats of Killz primer and beige travertine tile.
Step 5: Stage home with glass-top tables and fake ferns.
Step 6: Make $100,000.

The post-9/11 real estate boom couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. I was a bit too young and too poor to buy a fixer-upper of my own, but I was old enough to realize that a golden opportunity was passing me by. It fostered a sense of regret that hasn’t mixed well with my ADHD and that “I’m-so-special” feeling that all nerdy kids have. No matter how much I save or how quickly I climb the ladder at my latest job, I can’t help thinking, “There’s gotta be a better way.”

At the same time, a nagging voice in the back of my head says, “You know what would really prove to the world that you’re way more unique than everyone else? Teaching South African kids with HIV to design websites…or training inner-city teenage mothers to be part of a debate team that wins some important competition with a really big trophy.” Then I daydream about who would play me in the made-for-TV-movie version of my life. Then I remind myself that people whose selfless lives are turned into movies aren’t supposed to fantasize about it. It’s supposed to be all about the children or the spotted owls or the rainforests or whatever. You’re supposed to accept your award statuettes with a humble grin that says, “This? For me? Why, the joy of helping others has always been reward enough. Really, you’re too kind.”

Perhaps you, dear reader, can help me sort out some of my own career confusion by weighing in on this question:

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