Day 51

#51 is the number of one of my all time favorite Browns, Eddie "The Assassin" Johnson. One of the meanest, toughest linebackers in Browns history. Just loved him growing up. Unfortunately, Eddie's tie in to my family is that he too passed away in 2003 due to complications from cancer. I saw this quote when looking up to see when he died. It was Hanford Dixon talking about him: "E.J. was always such a fighter," said Dixon, who was drafted with Johnson in 1981. "At one point yesterday he took off his oxygen mask and left it off for over an hour as if to send us a message: I will not go down without a fight."

Woke up to snow this morning in Chicago. Just a dusting, but snow nonetheless. I was supposed to go to Grand Rapids in the morning, a 3 hour drive. We were going to leave at 5am, but the weather there is calling for 3 inches of snow overnight, so my co-worker and I are heading up there tonight instead. No point in trekking through the snow at 5am when I am half asleep. This is probably a better plan. Thanks goodness tomorrow is Friday. I am looking forward to the weekend. This week has seemed very long to me. The after the holiday week is always tougher. Seems like there is a lot of things to catch up on.

Its a strange thing about jobs, work, and pretty much everyone I know. Does anyone really love their job? My brother is a sportscaster and even he doesn't love what he is doing sometimes. I hated my last job. It was a joke of a company and I knew it. The last straw was when the essentially robbed me of about $5000. So I began to look around. I was lucky to hook up with a quality company like Prairie which treats its employees so well. But do I love the job? Not really. I look at my friends and the jobs they are in. Most of them do what they do for a paycheck and that is it. Do you think that Sheri is passionate about finding people jobs at her advertising agency or Sean loves being a broker at etrade financial? Not likely. I know another person living under this roof where I am typing this from who works extremely hard at her job yet gets zero satisfaction from it. It makes you wonder why we all do what we do. The answer is simple - Money. If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would be a sales manager selling plastic cups and foam plates, I would have told you that you were crazy.

Life works in strange ways. MD always wanted to be a play by play man for an NBA team. He knew it at age 6. How many people can say they are doing what they always dreamed of doing as a kid? Not many I know of. But he worked on this from high school on. He wrote a sports column for the newspaper. He went to college and as a freshman worked his way onto the most well known student radio station for sportscasting in the country. He became a basketball, football, and lacrosse play by play man and honed his skills at a young age. I could have done something like that. It would have been easy to go to the student station at KU and offer myself up to do some grunt work before getting my own show. I was too busy partying and not going to class to do so. Even my boy Sturch got his act together enough and he got his own show being "Roots Ryan" the reggae show dj on Saturday's from 4-6 for two years. I don't have many regrets in life, but that is definitely one of them, not taking the iniative to start early so I could eventually work in the sports field. I did intern one summer at the Kansas City Fox affiliate, which was great, but I never really pursued it any further. Oh well, what could have been.

Song of the Day: "Deacon Blues" by Steely Dan