Ten years ago I was sitting at the very same desk at which I currently sit, writing an article that I decided to call Pecunia Conundrum due to the fiscal woes I was facing at the time. I certainly would have never guessed that ten years later I would be back at the desk, reflecting on ten years of writing for the excellent Go Inside Magazine. Let us look back now on the last ten years and see how things have progressed to where they are now.

Lot in Life
Ten years ago I was about halfway through getting a degree in Communication from Rutgers University. At the time I was pretty sure that I was going to graduate and either enroll in the School of Library Science or get a job in Advertising or Public Relations. I thought I would certainly do one of these three because that is how I perceived the career path of a Communication major to be.

When I was in high school, a journalist for a local newspaper came and talked to us about journalism. The one thing I distinctly remember her telling us was that if we were interested in writing for a newspaper, we should absolutely not major in journalism — that journalism was a joke major at college and that we would do far better for ourselves if we would major in whatever interested us. The journalism we would learn by being journalists — just like pretty much every major jouralist that had ever written for a newspaper or had contributed to news radio or television. It was 1992, and there was not yet such a thing as journalism “on the web” as the majority of people in the world were not aware of any such thing.

I therefore went with what I thought would be a good starting point for me — communication. If things worked out in writing for a paper, that would be great. Otherwise, I could be like one of my favorite characters on television (Darrin Stephens from the classic show Bewitched) and work for an advertising agency. I thought that since I loved seeing ads so much it would be tremendously great work to make them as well. That was what I was thinking would happen. What happened instead was that I graduated with a degree in Communication and I immediately went to Israel to study in a Yeshiva— shortly after starting to become more religiously observant.

In the eight years that followed that, I have gone from one job to another but I never really settled down in anything resembling Public Relations or Advertising. It was not for a lack of applying — it just happened that everywhere I applied did not even interview me. For a good five years I did freelance work, mostly for one client. When he ran out of money and abruptly was no longer able to pay me, I did what any sensible person would do — I cried for a few days and started applying to jobs again. The job that I ended up getting, and have been working ever since, is a technical support position for a software company — though I have come to do a variety of different work in the company from insurance enrollment to training people how to use the software to some minor accounting when the office manager was out of the country.

This is not to say that I have not put my degree to good use. Far from it — it has tremendously helped me in writing both for Go Inside Magazine and the Boles Blogs Network — an impressive network of blogs that sprang forth from a single blog in 2005 and has grown to its current 13. I also feel that I have used the skills I learned in my Communication classes in just about every job I have held since graduating — even when I worked at Starbucks for awhile!

Looking for Love
Relationships and I were a big mess in 2000. I had just left one relationship and I was on the precipice of entering another one, which would turn out to be a bit of a mess in the end. That relationship was close to the beginning of my becoming more religiously observant, not that one had anything to do with the other. My next relationship didn’t happen until I was back from Israel and I got engaged to a woman from Australia — that ended quite badly. At this point I decided that I was not going to write about my relationships online because they didn’t seem to be going so great and after they ended, the articles ended up being a permanent reminder of how poor of a judge I was when it came to relationships.

This went on to even include the relationship that lasted six years and continues to this day as we are now married and expecting a baby in January of next year. I suppose it’s safe now to write that the person I have referred to as my friend Elizabeth has been first my girlfriend, then fiance, and now wife — just wanted to be sure that it would work out before putting that online in this glorious forum.

Life and Death and Living
As mentioned above, I have recently gotten married. The wedding itself was in March of this year. Since August of 2000, quite a few life events have happened. It’s hard to believe but August 1st of 2000 was only a couple of days after my mother and father separated, and my father and grandmother had moved out of the house in which we were living. In the time since then, both of my parents have remarried and my grandmother passed away.

As well, some of my favorite writers have passed away in the last decade — those being Douglas Adams and Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace. It is sad to note that of the four, two of them died by their own hand.

Conclusion
The last ten years have brought about much change in my life. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t see any of these things coming — particularly the part about becoming religiously observant and marrying a woman who converted to Judaism out of a passion for the religion. I am eager to see what the next ten years will bring — and, more importantly, eager to report it to you right here in Go Inside Magazine and the Boles Blogs Network.