I have always admired the overachiever. The kid who stopped growing at 5’7 but grew up to be a major league shortstop and even win a World Series MVP. The lower class kid from a single parent family in a rural town who was elected president twice in the 1990s. The chubby Indian kid from West Virginia who somehow ended up dating Emily. These people all worked hard to achieve dreams that should have been out of their grasps.
I am not one of these people. If you looked at my resume coming out of high school I looked like the prototype can’t miss kid. National Merit Scholar, student council president, two-way starter in football, voted Most Likely to Succeed. Ask anyone who knew me then and I had every appearance of a future Master of the Universe.
Yet here I am, ten years later. No girlfriend let alone wife or kids. Working another in a series of entry-level jobs routinely populated by 22-year olds. Thirty-five pounds past my playing weight, drinking and smoking more than I did at 21. The picture of an underachiever rapidly approaching 30.
Things started to crystallize for me last spring when I realized that I was days away from being forced to address a lot of my friends as “Dr.” Dr. Barker, Dr. Gahan…gulp… Dr. Marouni. Over the previous four years I had been living and partying with these people, but now they had something to show for it. Well, something other than a Guinness record for most times dropping out of law school.
So now I’m looking to turn this pattern around. This blog will chronicle my adventures in trying to get there. If me trying to grow up sounds like a familiar refrain, well, you probably read my old columns (http://www.geocities.com/glenng79/archive.html, http://striversandslackers.blogspot.com/). Hopefully this new blog will be as fun to write (and my Boston friends will be just as understanding of me selling them out at every turn).
Oh, and the blog title is just a bald joke.
No comments:
Post a Comment