As far as I can remember, I’ve suppressed my desire to be creative in a career. I thought the only acceptable careers were the Big Three: doctor, lawyer, engineer, and I was going to do one of those until I realized I didn’t really like any of them after all and who wants to work that hard? I like putting things together to make new and different things, but because I did well in math and science and I have a terrible preoccupation with prestige, I managed to piece together a couple degrees, thrown in with an internship that I hated and hope out popped something I would like - which didn’t happen. I love the subject matter, cities and planning, but hate the actual work of it. The being in an office, the spreadsheet, the data, the analysis, the documentation, the arbitrary rules, the inflexible workplace, the sitting, the everything. It doesn’t feel like “doing.”
What I failed to realize or think really hard about was what was the kind of DOING that I wanted to do. I thought the things that I liked to do were for hobbies or for wimps that enjoy job insecurity. Now I find that I have no tangible “doing” skills. Maybe I have thinking skills but I don’t enjoy solitary work and when given the choice, I procrastinate until everything hits the fan and I have to actually produce something.
I love people, facilitating, teaching, doing, helping. Not analyzing, reporting, documenting, calculating. It’s difficult to figure this out so late in the game (“But you’re young and can do anything you want!”) but it still feels like a millennia to even think about going back to school or starting anew, since the things I think I might like to do require ohhh, experience?
![theatlantic:
Suicide Has Killed More Troops Than the War in Afghanistan This Year
154 active duty troops have committed suicide in the first 155 days of the new year—a rate alarmingly close to one per day. The number dead from suicides eclipses the U.S. forces killed in Afghanistan by about 50 percent.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire. [Image: AP]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5au9z3Q7A1qcokc4o1_250.jpg)
![theatlantic:
What March Madness Can Teach Us About the Economic Geography of Sports
Geographically speaking, one thing is abundantly clear: The majority of March Madness teams hail from small and mid-size metros (those with less than one million people) and college towns. Roughly 60 percent of this 2012 NCAA tournament teams come from small and mid-size metros. Just 10 percent hail from the nation’s ten largest metros. Only one of the top 16 seeds, Georgetown in Washington D.C., comes from a top-ten metro. All four of the top seeds—Kentucky, Syracuse, North Carolina, and Michigan State—are located in small and mid-size metros.
At first blush, this makes sense. Lots of college and universities, after all, are located in college towns.
But big cities boast large numbers of colleges and universities and have tremendous numbers of students enrolled in college. Greater New York alone has dozens of options for the college-bound, and hundreds of thousands of students. The same is true of Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, D.C., and of course Boston. In fact there was a time not too long ago when big city teams did dominate college basketball. UCLA, with 11 titles, is the all-time leader in NCAA championships.
The pattern holds not just for college sports, but for sports across the board. You would think large metros with big pro sports franchises, superstar payrolls, state-of-the-art stadiums and arenas, and gigantic media markets would dominate the sports economy, but they don’t. The fact of the matter is that small and medium-sized communities have much higher economic concentrations of sports occupations, even when pro sports and every other kind of sports is taken into account.
What lies behind this pattern?
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
LOVE THAT THEY USED A PICTURE OF THE 2008 CHAMPIONSHIP OMGGFGGGGGG](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0s2sy43ov1qcokc4o1_250.jpg)
