Urban Adventures

Overview
In April of 2006, I made the decision to move from my hometown of Tucson, AZ to the urban sprawl that is Orange County...or more specifically Irvine. My logic for the move was twofold;

1. I'd finished helping my family out of a tough spot
2. I was bored

I packed up my worldy posessions, and headed west like some Arizona style "Beverly Hillbilly". With $2000, a couple of bikes and guitars, and not a whole lot of planning, I would seek my fortune. The first 6 months out here, I lived in a mansion by the sea and almost ran out of money twice as I tried to acclimate to the dramatic price jump of SoCal. The next two years, I lived on campus at UC-Irvine, getting my ass kicked in graduate school with the corporate folks at a top-rated MBA program.

There's your 90 second summary.

Current thought

6 classes away from a Master's degree or 6 months to go. Take your pick. It still feels strange, but I've grown to accept that for $95,000 I get to have 3 letters at the end of my name the rest of my life (I wonder if I would've paid $500,000, if I could have had the alphabet at the end...or at least picked 13 letters in an order I liked.......). It's interesting though that the higher you go in education, the more people get so tied into their professional life they don't balance out their personal lives. This leads to a lot of unfulfilled professional people in their mid-30s with money, but no time to do anything, and they wish they "would've traveled more when younger, would've dated that girl, would've raced in cycling, etc". I've heard this a lot in the past few months, and see it as a cautionary tale. The key point here is a balanced lifestyle...work to get ahead, but don't do it to the extreme you miss out on what life has to offer. Sometimes you only have a limited window to do things, so take advantage of it!