Advice for Day 35: You gotta stop letting the Universe kick your ass all around this world

So I am going to try to make a long story short, which is rarely successful in the garrulously wonderful world I have created for myself...look I'm failing already.

Anyway, the short story is my boss (aka my very temporary part-time I will never put this on a resume boss) is crazy. She has been sucked into some bogus religious/pyramid scheme called Avatar (yes like the second-life video game) created by a man that got KICKED OUT OF SCIENTOLOGY- how crazy do you have to be to be kicked out of a church that eats placenta.

In her crazyness, she has decided that all her staff should also be educated in the Avatar way, which is a waste of time, money and my precious little sanity. But amid all the crazy, I have actually found a pretty genius nugget of less crazy.

The story Avatar tells is of a kid coming in from playing in the snow one day. He is standing in the doorway, letting the snow blow in. His mother yells at him, "Either choose in or out or i will choose for you." Avatar explains that the same is true for life; if you don't choose, the universe will choose for you. We call this fate but really it is just indecision.

For years I have thought fate was pushing me to be a journalist. I became editor of my high school paper with virtually no effort. I got these random articles published in local papers. I worked with a news organization in Argentina. None of this was really intentional career moves; it seemed fate wanted me to be a journalist.

Or really it was just mother universe slamming the door on an indecisive child, making me stay in the warm comfort of the house I know so well. I have always known how to write and I have always know how to tell a damn good story but it has not always been my conscience decision to be a journalist; it is my default.

When i try to get in touch with that illusive gut it doesn't want to move to Roswell, NM to live on 18,000 a year and 5 vacation days. It doesn't want to chase cop cars or listen to the police scanner. It doesn't want to have a "beat." It doesn't really want to be a reporter at all.

Still I love seeing my name in print and the newsroom does have this frenzied caffeinated smell to it that i love. I love listening to someone's story and then retelling it better. And finding the perfect quote to end a story makes transcribing 3 hours of tape worth it.

And so i am still a contradiction of guts. Which is why i am still standing in the doorway, sending resumes to papers i will never work at and not yet understanding what i really want to do.

But i know this time needs to be different. This time I have to stop letting mother universe kick my ass where ever is easiest. This time I know i don't really want to stay in the kitchen; i am done with safe. This time i have to step out of that door and into that blizzard of uncertainty.

Advice for Day 33: Change, Baby, Change

As I sat in Green Bay drinking my imported liberal Madison beer and watching the crowd gather in Grant Park to celebrate Obama's victory, the only thing I could think to myself is: I should be there.

My next thought was: Why am I not there?

I said by November 1st I would be in Chicago. But fear of not finding a job and/or not finding myself in the city has kept me in the relative comfort of Green Bay, where i have the ease of a part time job and a reliable old self imagine to fall back on.

But hearing Obama's speech and seeing the people of Chicago made me realize you don't accomplish greatness by staying static. Change, the pesky slogan toted around from 2 years, seems to be the only way to really discover who you are and who you are meant to be.

As Obama says:"For that is the true genius of America -- that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

The genius of life is the ability to adapt, to take what we have accomplished and add to its beauty,to stretch for that illusive perfection. And that does not happen by sitting in green bay waiting for winter to freeze you in.

Sometimes it takes the first black man becoming president of the United States of America to realize that you too can make change, you too can change - even if Wolf Blitzer doesn't cover it for 24 hours straight on CNN.