Okay Then. That's It.

That was some decade, wasn't it?

I could focus on the ten years of crap we were handled by this world (eight of them by the Bush administration) but I think everyone with a blog, a tweet or a status update is doing that now. I like to think of things in a more self absorbed way.

When 1999 turned to 2000 I was in bed with a girl I met that day. Things could only go up from there. I met my wife two weeks later. I started in advertising, a career I would struggle against the entire decade, six months after that. I spent no energy in forwarding that track and the money on things I really cared about. Like more guitars, HD tvs and hardcover comic books.

Got married right in the middle of the decade. I was bored out of my mind by my job at this point and tried everything creative to get out of it. Joined a sketchy band, made little comedy videos (and sent them to Youtube as soon as they opened), and started this blog.

Then I discovered stand-up comedy. And got laid off. Within six weeks of each other. Everything changed. I gave it all up to persue a dream. A dream of pulling chuckles out of small groups of half drunk strangers. I put myself through several doses of humiliation to prove something to myself. That I was funny. I proved that much. Handing out flyers at the Improv I got seven shows a week and a "Colbert Report" audition. Things looked promising.

Then Ben was born. And everything changed again. I had a decision to make. I could either vecome a good comic or a good dad. I wasn't willing to sacrifice a son that was here for a career that might not happen. I stayed home to raise him and went out less nights. I got less bookings and apart from my own show (two years running) I wasn't part of the scene. Another audition, this one for the Onion, came and went and once the economy tanked, I had another decision to make. I had to go back to work.

Once Ben turned two, he was ready for day care and I was ready to go back to the office. I quickly got into Continuity as they merged with McGarry/Bowen and started pitching. Suddenly I was on a $100 million dollar account that everyone was talking about. I wrote a website that got millions of hits a day. I got a staff position, a promotion and an office. The success I was working so hard for fell into my lap from my back-up plan. The years of stand-up comedy had paid off in an unexpected way.

I'd like to say this decade changed everything but it changed everything again and again. This was the first real decade of my adulthood (the 90's were college and struggle, the 80's and 70's pure childhood) and yet things changed as much as they had in earlier decades. Now that I'm a husband and father, can I expect more changes from teh next ten years? Or maybe, a little stability.