Obviously, I Haven't blogged much lately. I haven't blogged because I haven't really had much to say. In the past week I've worked, played Knights of the Old Republic, and read books and magazines. I did get to see Gerry, and we watched all kinds of geek TV and sporadic bits of the Cubs losing on Saturday. It's been a rough season for the Cubs so far, having an injured list comparable to Valley Forge.

So, in the absence of things worth driving to, I've been thinking about the public figures and closer friends I admire, trying to figure out what I should be doing in my life and if I went wrong somewhere. Without getting too self-absorbed, I do feel that at some point in high school or college I was mislead. Not by any person or institution, per se, but by the dot-com-era ideal that I was assured wealth and success directly out of college because I was majoring in something computer related. My unconscious and unerring belief in digital entertainment as the land of milk and honey was my driving reason to get through college. I scoffed at anyone who questioned the validity of computer art, eagerly pointing out that innovation was the key to revitalizing the increasingly irrelevant art field, much like photography had done a century before. In hindsight, though, I've come to realize that the computer art program at USF was a little recruitment sham that the school started when it was facing bankruptcy that, through the nurturing dedication of a communication professor and an animation pro, evolved into a legitimate study program. I ended up with what I think might be a great education, but as the job market evaporated, I never got a real chance to test this.

Thus, my present dilemma. In examining different people whom I admire, I've noticed that there are curious blank spots in each of their biographies. Without using Google, tell me what Matt Groening was doing when he was twenty-four years old. What about Jack Kerouac? Neil Gaiman? Douglas Adams? Tom Waits? What about prestigious people I don't like so much, like John Ashcroft, or most of the cast of Friends? At some point I got old enough that I stopped hearing "when I was your age" stories. This could be because there comes a point in every life when you just sit in the ocean on your little dingy of dreams waiting for something, anything, to happen. Case in point:

Before the Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan spent his early to mid twenties as a chunky, depressed, writers-blocked wanna-be rocker. He spent a little while in Florida with a little Cure knockoff metal band called the Marked. Nothing much came of this back in the era of decadent wuss-rock, and he ended up back in Chicago where things finally started to work out for him.

Conan O'Brien graduated from Harvard with all kinds of high honors and accolades, moved to the west coast, and promptly got a job in a leather jacket store. His first few TV attempts weren't even noticeable, and even when he eventually scored a job as a writer on Saturday Night Live he was still largely invisible.

Try this: think of five people over the age of forty, famous or familiar. Can you determine with certainty what they were doing in their mid-twenties? Was it at all glorious or rewarding beyond the satisfaction of hard work?

So, here I am, full of promise in the quarter-century quagmire. This is my main motivation to go to grad school, to get out of this town and out of this funk. BSU seems far more oriented in the practical application of my knowledge, which is exactly what I want. Perhaps in two years time I'll be able to say with certainty that I really did do something constructive with my young professional life.