9/29/2001 12:30 PM

            I have been on this earth for 22 years now.  I have many regrets and what-ifs in my life.  Some of these are very minor, trivial things really.  Some are the kind that can drive you insane and tear your soul apart if you cannot learn to let go and forget.

            What if I had accepted the offers from Penn State or the U of Mass at Amherst?  How would my life be different?  Would I have an engineering degree by now?  Would I be happy?  Married?  Where would I be living?  Would I be attending grad school in a dull field?  Would I become content with the deafening mediocrity that my life would become? 

            What happens when a string in the tapestry of my life is pulled?  I’d become unraveled, a man I could have been, but chose not to be.  Had I chosen the other path, I’d probably be much more dull than I am today.  Is that really possible?  Would I have ever discovered photography?  Would I write as much as I do now?

            There are a lot of unanswered questions here.  What makes me the person I am today?  Is it my experiences, my failures, my successes, my friends, my loneliness, my compassion, my apathy?  Who am I with the past I had chosen or not chosen?  I guess this has become an essay of questions instead of answers.

            What would have become of me if I had been a little braver with the girls in high school?  Would I have ended up married, stuck with children already like some of the old friends I know?

            As pitiful as my life seems sometimes, I am pretty happy with the choices I have made.  I am happy with the person that I have become.  I’m awesome, it might just be a while before someone else figures that out.  There are still goals to accomplish, wrongs to right.  What are my plans for the future?

• There is no way in hell that I want kids before I’m 30
• I will attempt to move to Portland, or perhaps Seattle in the summer of 2002
• Before 2003 or 2004, Matt and I will open our multimedia production company
• I will become a famous (or infamous) photographer eventually
• I will write a novel
• I will own a house that I designed
• I will become the alcoholic that I have always aspired to be
• I will give journalism a shot
• When people ask “What would Jesus not do?”, I will have a clever response for them based on something I have done

The sky is not the limit, it is the beginning…