Friday, January 1, 2021

It was 20 Years Ago Today...

 ...That we made a New Years resolution to change.

It was a dreary New Years Day. Aren't they all? We went with a friend to buy a suit and listened to NFL wrap up from the weekend's playoffs. A Monday, which meant everyone was going back to work the next day. Not us, though.

We were at the end of a string of failures that began with our transfer to a non-Jesuit university in Washington DC in 1995. On January 1, 2001 we were a 27 year old college dropout who'd been under and unemployed for five years. We were at our professional lowest. 

In late 2000, we realized we watched the same movies, read the same books, even told the same jokes as we had five years before, ten. One afternoon in late autumn we found our HS  year book from junior year, published in 1991. We were struck at how happy we seemed back then. Even today, thinking back to being 17 years old, all we see is the sun. 

We certainly weren't happy in the autumn of 2000. It was a glum time passed by daily perusing the help wanted adds and looking forward to football Sundays. We took Mrs. Stroock to work most days, a long slog that kept us in the car for an hour and half. We listened to a lot of sports-talk radio. We enjoyed watching the Redskins implode more than we enjoyed watching the Giants win the NFC. 

We'd been out of work since early August.  Whatever we were doing and the way we went about doing it didn't work. We needed to change and we needed to work on ourselves. 

The only real resolution we remember is to work out. We started with dumbbells four or five times a week. We've been a gym rat ever since. We aggressively looked for work, and applied to the Bush Administration. Despite being related to this man, we called him up in Wyoming and sent him our resume, we struck out. We blame him, actually. There's no reason we shouldn't have gotten a gig in the VP's office. Bastard. Him not the veep. It's probably for the best. We kept looking till April.

About that time Mrs. Stroock revealed she had some job offers that would take us to Northern New Jersey. We decided to go back to school, online. In July we resettled to Peapack New Jersey. And so we made a change.

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