Progress Report

Ten years I started this blog by lamenting about the fact that I had never become a stand-up comedian. I was able to stave off any truly morose feelings by remembering the career trajectory of Gabe Kaplan. Little did I know that after a few years of hosting High Stakes Poker on The Game Show Network, after a couple decades of quiet and relative obscurity playing poker professionally, Gabe would once again choose to duck out of the spotlight. Or perhaps he had that path chosen for him. This is something that didn't occur to me as much a decade ago. I was still in the first ten years of my own job versus career struggle. At that point, I had spent longer at that job, teaching, than I had with any other. I could still imagine how things might turn out.
I was the father of an eight year old boy. I was teaching fourth grade as I looked forward to a new installment of the second Star Wars trilogy, the one that was going to close the circle and bring things to a close in a galaxy far, far, away. I didn't own a big screen TV or a cell phone. There were still so many frontiers left to conquer. So many things left to try.
And yet I continued to hit that rut and make it mine. Same school. Same house. Same wife. Same kid. This past weekend my wife and I finally painted over the scratches our dog had made in all the years she had been running in her sleep next to our bed. Same wife had been to Europe. Same son has rounded that corner and headed toward adulthood, with a brief stop in College Land. I believe he will still find a way to turn his father's dream of working at Disneyland into a reality, but that's all part of the rut that I know so well.
Not unlike the well-known rut I find here at Entropical Paradise. Five years ago, I used to wonder if I would have anything left to say after I had recounted every one of my childhood memories. I find that every time I go back to that drawer, there is something new to look at, even if I'm looking at the same fifteen minutes I was reviewing just a month before. This is the gift of consistency. I know my base. Consequently, however, I sometimes find myself curious about what is just over that horizon. Is it a chance to make millions playing poker? Is it inventing the next must-have app for teachers and students alike? Could it be that I was never really cut out to be Spider Man in the first place, and I am really more suited to be Captain America after all?
Or Captain Blog. It doesn't have the same ring, and it will probably never turn into a movie, but it might be a two-minute YouTube clip. Ten years ago, YouTube was a dorky little corner of the Internet for cat videos and porn. Now it's a great big corner of Al Gore's Internet for cat videos and porn, owned by Google. So, I should take heart. Things really do change.