I had a friend when I was in high school. We both lived in small towns in Southern Indiana. Her family consisted of her and and older brother. Eventually, her older brother moved out…to a trailer on their property 25 yards away. I remember once listening to her mother talk about where my friend was going to live when she was an adult. She couldn’t decide if it would be on some of their property behind of the parent’s house, or maybe another house a little farther down the road. Even at 15, I was horrified. Why would she let her own parents trap her in this town, where the highest paid job was the 7-11 clerk. It was madness. Didn’t she want to see the world?? Experience things, and so forth. We stopped being friends when I moved to Louisville my senior year of high school.

More recently I had another friend who I met while on my first task at my current company. She worked for another contractor. But that wasn’t her life aspirations, her life aspiration was to work for the government. Not a bad goal, truly, I’m not knocking it. However, I was just really confused. She was smart, very smart and could have earned some serious money at any of the DC contractor’s. She would have moved up the career ladder in no time.  I reminded her of that fact, repeatedly. She reminded me that that is not what she wanted. She wanted the security and safety and predictability; a governemnt job would give that to her.

Last I heard, my friend from high school became a nurse and still lives in Southern Indiana. She married some guy who already had kids, and was rumored to beat up on her. My other friend got her dream job on the government team, and daily deals with life as a bureaucratic drone- although personally she is very happy and married to nice guy.

Both of these scenarios scare me death, I am not a ‘stay-in-one-place’ sort of person. My parents divorced when I was three- since then I lived with my mom for five years, then my dad for two more years, back to my mom’s for two years (this time in Illinois, instead of Southern Indiana) until, then back to my dad in Souther Indiana, then we moved to Louisville. About that time, I was graduating high school. After high school, I became an exchange student in Germany. After six months there I went to England for 18 months, then back to Louisville, back to Germany after I enlisted in the Army. That”s when I got married, and then the Army moved us from Germany to Ft. Lewis, WA, then to Aberdeen, MD, then to North Carolina, and finally back to Maryland. Wow, I’ve never written all that down before. (tl;dr I move A LOT)

For me moving is a way of life. The longest I’ve lived somewhere is 5 years, and I was EIGHT.

I have a point. I’ll get to it in the next post. I know you’re probably pissed, this post doesn’t really have a pay-off. Think of it as a cliff-hanger.