30

It’s my 30th birthday. How did I get here?

It was always difficult as a child to think about the future without having major life events attached to them – the milestones that we all are societally trained to believe are simply standard for everyone.

I have a hard time remembering exactly when my view of the future shifted from pure fantasy to something I thought was attainable – but even then, what did attainable even mean?

_

My future never felt more uncertain than it did a decade ago. I had stayed in Columbia for spring break, opting to make the six-hour drive back to the Chicago area a week later as my sister got me tickets to the Cubs’ home opener for my birthday – a game I was forced to leave early due to an all-too common panic attack.

My birthday itself fell during the University of Missouri’s spring break that year, something that echoed what I experienced essentially my whole childhood – I had school off thanks to it almost always happening during spring break.

Going to a school of over 30,000 students, my last concern when entering college was making friends – I had a decent group of friends in high school thanks to being quite involved in extracurricular activities, and felt that I would have no problem meeting people at Mizzou.

It’s kind of surreal in hindsight how the first sign of how adulthood works is how much things change with your social life when people move out of dorms and into apartments – something that happens for most at Mizzou (or at least did when I was a student there). After getting used to an incredibly communal environment where I had company for every meal and study session, moving into an apartment off-campus meant being faced with the responsibility and freedom of being alone.

On my 20th birthday, both of my roommates were gone for spring break – one had just been living in a different apartment the whole semester, while the other was insufferable to live with, making staying back for spring break an attractive option. That didn’t make the loneliness any easier to bear, however.

Sure, I had dreams of being a play-by-play announcer – I was calling games on a now-defunct platform trying to build an audience while I was willing to do whatever it took after college to give myself an opportunity – even though it’s just about the most nepotism-dominated field there is, and my dad isn’t Jack Buck, Ian Eagle or Marv Albert.

But beyond having this very clear motivation, I was beyond lost. My grades were shit, as I was on academic probation barely hanging on as a student at the university, while feeling like I had been a massive disappointment. I entered the university aiming to be a journalism major, struggled enough during my first semester to knock me out of the pre-journalism program, and now was just trying to get a degree, worrying about whatever came next later on.

The only other person I saw on that date a decade ago was the Domino’s delivery driver – I remember bawling my eyes out when the clock hit midnight, feeling like my best, younger years were already in the rearview mirror while being absolutely terrified of what my future looked like as a real adult.

I have a hard time identifying the reasons why my life has turned out the way it has – and I feel equally grateful and lucky that my worst fears from 10 years ago were not even true in the slightest. Yet, I’m also certainly no play-by-play announcer, and honestly never got remotely close to being one.

–

I’m 30 years old today. In many ways, I think the person I am now was already mostly in place at this time a decade ago, when I was greatly overwhelmed by the uncertainty in my life at the time. Will I even graduate college? Will I find a gratifying career in a field I can be successful in? Will the Cubs actually win a World Series with this young core of players?

Yes.

That level of certainty didn’t enter the picture for quite some time still – but the corner was turned not too long afterwards. Improving my living situation to get away from a roommate I had absolutely nothing in common with, I moved in to an off-campus house with my two closest friends from college – one of whom tossed me an all-time curveball when letting me know he was dropping out the day before our second semester began.

Despite having a bit more stability and comfortability with my living situation, I was far from a good place mentally. My panic attacks were occurring on a near-daily basis, and my grades were once again deteriorating, leading me to think about leaving the university and trying to finish again at a later time – something I know deep down I wouldn’t have been able to do.

Looking back, I really do feel like I forget just how mentally volatile I was at the time, and how often I was just ready to think about giving up on all of it – that my fate had been sealed as a failure as both a college student and adult.

Just two days after the Cubs won the 2016 World Series in what is still probably the most emotional moment of my life, I drove back from the Chicago suburbs to Columbia, opting out of attending the massive championship parade as I had missed an entire week of class.

When I was just around 30 minutes away from CoMo, I got pulled over by a Missouri State Highway Patrol officer who clocked me going 90 in a 70 – no way of getting out of this one.

In reality, today, I know that a speeding ticket really sucks – but it also isn’t the end of the world. If I had thought about the situation rationally at the time, I would have thought through me being in a relatively fortunate position of being able to pay the ticket, pay attention to my driving and move on. But for me, this felt like the end of the world.

The Cubs may have won their first World Series in 108 years just two days earlier, but I was as angry as I had ever been in my entire life as I stormed back into my house to see my roommates for the first time in a week. To this day, I think about all the shit I subjected them to by simply being nowhere near myself for such a long time – I owe a lot of being able to eventually right the ship mentally to them.

–

By the time I was done with my junior year, I started to realize that I really could finish in college in four years. I had gotten off academic probation, an extremely difficult math class was no longer required for my major of sociology, and most of the difficult classes I had to take in order to graduate were behind me.

I lived with my one remaining roommate from the previous year in an off-campus apartment not known for student housing during my senior year of college, a time I will always look back incredibly fondly on. While you’re in college, it’s easy to forget how the people you’ve structured your life around in many ways for the past several years are going to go a different direction – and we all have to start over with making friends.

After studying as hard as I ever did in my life to grasp statistics enough to earn a C in the class, I graduated from the University of Missouri with a B.A. in sociology in May 2018 – an accomplishment that did and still does in many ways, feel surreal.

While it certainly wasn’t play-by-play announcing, I had a plan in place for the time after college. After getting a job at a local grocery store, I began a long hiring process for a wine and spirits distributor affiliated with the supplier company my dad had long worked for.

Despite never being much of a drinker (and not being one at all today), this felt like an incredibly stable and solid path for me to take as a career. The industry had perfectly weathered the 2008 financial crisis, which shielded my family from many of the effects most Americans felt, with this position offering plenty of upward mobility, the protection of a union with excellent benefits and much higher pay than I had gotten at any job up until that point of my life.

I took the job in August 2018, though by March I was pretty sure that driving around to retail chains and selling an addictive drug was not something that I wanted to do for a living – which started my search for an exit plan.

I’ll never forget the moment I said “fuck it, I’m chasing my passion.”

–

While working as a sales rep, I lived near Chicago’s lakefront in the Uptown neighborhood – an incredibly convenient spot for both commuting and access to restaurants, events and nightlife – but not so convenient when it comes to seeing my family in the suburbs.

I remember making what was supposed to be a 40-minute drive more of an 80-minute drive due to taking a route far too unconventional to get to the southwest suburbs, eventually arriving far too late at a family brunch that was mostly forgettable.

On my drive home though, I turned on ESPN radio and listened in live to Game 7 of the 2019 Western Conference Semifinals between the Denver Nuggets and Portland Trail Blazers – following along as a heroic performance from CJ McCollum sent Portland to their first Conference Final since 2000.

I then made it home in time to watch Kawhi Leonard sink the shot heard around the basketball world to close out the Philadelphia 76ers and send the Raptors to the Conference Final, convincing me that this shit was far too exciting for me to just stay on the sidelines.

Somehow, within four years, I was talking about the Chicago Cubs as part of an official network podcast, living out my dream of doing what I love for a living. But living dreams is about so much more than whatever you happen to do for work.

–

Around a month after that had all happened, I met Kathleen. My life was already quite different at this point – I had gotten a job at Whole Foods to keep some sort of cashflow going after quitting my previous job and enrolling in Illinois Media School, a six-month broadcasting program that I hoped would catapult me into the field.

Kathleen was about to enter her senior year of undergraduate education at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and happened to be in Chicago for the summer to complete a program at DePaul University. Thanks to the only lucky match I ever got on a dating app, I stumbled across her.

We started dating within a few weeks and were essentially inseparable the entire summer, as I dedicated myself to the program at IMS and worked at Whole Foods in between. With that said, I was and am a realist – I couldn’t possibly expect this kind of relationship to work out when I have to stay back in Chicago while she heads back to school on the east coast.

What also made this timing feel a bit strange was I had just entered a mindset that I was fully content with living my life as a bachelor, flexible to move wherever and whenever to chase my dream of being a play-by-play announcer – a skill I felt I was uniquely positioned to be great in, and a career I sometimes felt was my destiny – that every setback in life was worth it because that is what I was working towards.

It’s wild to think about life and isolate the moments where one different outcome would have changed absolutely everything. Had I never matched with Kathleen, maybe my future would have been that of a single man, moving to a rural area in hopes of climbing the lofty ladder up to the top of the sports media echelon.

Sure, I’m not a play-by-play announcer, and I can confidently say that I won’t be one, as I watch those to my junior such as Noah Eagle and Chris Caray call games at the highest level. And that’s more than okay.

–

I initially thought that my experience at media school would give me, at best, an entry-level job in an extremely small market somewhere in rural America. Yet thanks to being reminded by my dad, there was still one string left to pull locally.

Around 10 years earlier, my dreams of talking about sports for a living weren’t any different. I was approaching the end of 8th grade when the Chicago Blackhawks were on their run to the 2010 Stanley Cup championship when I had asked him to tape me doing a mock postgame show of the first game of their Conference Final against the San Jose Sharks.

My younger sister joined in of course, as younger sisters tend to, and the uploaded video caught the attention of an executive producer for WGN-TV – who offered for us to appear live on TV to talk about the Blackhawks’ run.

The two of us would appear on air via recorded video several times over the next few years while I was in high school, and my dad had held on to the contact as I moved on into my adult years.

Not long after finishing my time at IMS, I reached out to the producer, asking if there were potentially any low-level opportunities at the station I could get started in. That opportunity? Overnight news writing intern, Monday-Friday, 2-9 a.m.

Knowing that advancing towards what I wanted to do took sacrifice, I didn’t hesitate in exploring the position – which I was offered after taking a writing test in-person. Sure, it wasn’t sports and it was in the middle of the night, but it was a way to enter the wider media world and to give myself experience that I hoped would eventually lead to something in sports.

It didn’t take long for sports to take a definitive backseat to news and everything I was pursuing that year. Kathleen and I remained in a long-distance relationship, I was now asleep during most games I would be watching and it was a consequential election year.

Oh yeah, and there’s this pesky virus from overseas that people keep talking about.

I’m far from alone when it comes to people who had their lives drastically changed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns that came with it – yet still, I can’t think of another time in which so much changed seemingly at once.

I was sent home from WGN and connected to work remotely via VPN, while Kathleen was sent home from Amherst for the semester around the same time. What was a very involved, hands-on internship in-person turned into me asking every producer how I could help, seeing my responsibilities essentially disappear overnight.

While I did assist in booking guests for interviews and finding stories for producers, I spent most of my “work” time playing old video games, watching movies or just reading about the most random shit I could possibly find on the internet. Though my internship was set to end in July, I was given an indefinite extension due to the changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the summer began, my relationship with Kathleen was undoubtedly fast-tracked due to the pandemic – as she was preparing to start her Ph.D program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, we moved in together thanks to me still being fully remote at WGN. Within just a few weeks of living together, I was sure that I had found my life partner.

Though I wasn’t sure if it would be news or sports that would come up next for me, I was offered the chance to interview for an in-house opening on WGN’s digital team – something that intrigued me quite a bit. Instead of writing abbreviated all-caps scripts for anchors and reporters, I could now have the chance to write articles all-day for a living – you know, the thing I originally went to school for.

I was offered the job as a per diem digital producer in August 2020, starting my job at right around the same time Kathleen began her time as a Ph.D student. After months of essentially not working, being on the digital team in such a riveting time threw me right into the fire, and I got a true taste of what working in such a fast-paced environment is like.

My first day in-person for a full shift came the night after a trigger-happy right-wing white boy opened fire during unrest in nearby Kenosha, Wisconsin following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, killing two protesters.

This introduced me to the frenetic pace I would have to live in and thrive in over the course of the next several years, covering events that I know would continue to shape my worldview and also make me question if what I was really doing was true journalism.

–

It may be hard to think of a random core memory off the cuff, while there’s other memories that will always place you right in the moment as if it had just happened, with the smells of the room and the layout of the furniture appearing equally fresh in one’s mind.

I’ll never forget opening the door to my mom’s house on the night of Oct. 4, 2020, laying eyes on Luna for the first time. After a month in foster care with Kathleen’s sister, this beautiful 1-year-old Border Collie/Lab mix was ours – and I knew immediately how much this dog would change my life – as well as the certainty of her giving both Kathleen and I perhaps the worst day in our lives at some point in the future.

Luna immediately became everything to both of us – for a couple of nervous people who were never planning on having children, having an equally nervous dog with us everyday appeared to be the perfect solution – and through so many difficult days of processing gut-wrenching news and having to put my feelings on it all to the side, we were all there and are all there for each other. If that’s the trade-off I made for not pursuing a career as a play-by-play announcer, then it was a pretty damn good one.

–

True discontent in the workplace feels like one of the true rites of passage in adult life. I had been mostly happy at WGN – I loved the team I worked with and felt like I was doing a good job for my age and position I was in, and therefore figured I would eventually get the chance to work there full-time.

After applying for and even interviewing for an opening of a full-time position, I was flatly ghosted by the station’s news director for what ultimately became months on-end – until I finally brought it up to my direct supervisor who told me in no uncertain terms that she wouldn’t blame me if I began to look for jobs elsewhere.

And I had no choice – approaching my 26th birthday in a country that emphatically kicks people off of their parents’ health insurance at that age, I needed to find a job that would give me the base level of protection for a life-altering emergency.

Following months of looking for a new job, I briefly caught on with WCIU in Chicago as a digital producer for a now-cancelled news magazine program they aired in collaboration with Block Club Chicago. While this opportunity looked and sounded incredible during the interview process and included the stability of health insurance, it ultimately was a nightmare beyond belief.

I was ultimately expected to have had a lot more experience with video/photo editing than I did, despite my communication during the interview process that I was a beginner at best with some of the most complicated software to learn. Entering a work environment that was rife with poor leadership and a glaring lack of training and organization, I was looking for yet another exit route not even a month into my employment with them.

I never thought it would get to this, but I was yearning for a job just like WGN again – a job where writing was the primary expectation and everything else was something less important that I could figure out later. In a moment of simply being really lucky, there was an opening for a full-time digital position at NBC Chicago, a job I was offered after a painfully long interview process that stretched the span of nearly two months.

–

I started with NBC Chicago in September 2022 and was greeted by what I would still call the most incredible team of people to work with. Beyond having colleagues that were really good at their jobs and helpful when things were going haywire, they were also incredibly compassionate and conscientious.

Remote work was supported and encouraged, and the impact such an intense and disturbing career field can have on one’s mental health was frequently and openly discussed – something I consistently pushed for during my time there.

When I first began at NBC, my wife and I were working towards a move to Canada after she finished her Ph.D program – I had little doubt that she could find a job somewhere there, while I was building on experience that I hoped would fare well for me by the time this potential move happened.

Yet after confronting the reality of just how fucking hard it is to emigrate, plans were changed and our future became about wherever we would find the best opportunity in regards of employment and cost of living within the United States – something that altered how my individual future would look, as New York City and Los Angeles are the only steps up from Chicago in the world of media.

This wouldn’t be such a bad thing as the world’s current events made working in the news tougher and tougher. There had already been plenty of tragic events I had covered that had kept me up at night – the Chicago police killings of Adam Toledo and Anthony Alvarez, the aforementioned Kenosha shooting and ensuing acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, a historically violent 2021 in Chicago and the Uvalde school shooting.

Still, nothing changed how I feel about working in news going forward like the immediate and ongoing response from corporate media to the October 7 attacks in Israel, and the subsequent genocide Israel has carried out against Palestinians.

–

I remember waking up to work the morning of the attacks, with a pit in my stomach over both what had just occurred, and the disproportionate military and propaganda response I knew was well on the way.

What I couldn’t have been prepared for was just how blatant of a bias both my station and every other corporate-owned media outlet would take when it came to the conflict and ensuing war/genocide.

I had my qualms in the past at WGN over coverage that I believed was too friendly to the police, particularly with the insane amount of attention one of the station’s “investigative” reporters would give to the far-right president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police. Yet that was still nothing compared to what I was about to witness at NBC across the media landscape over my final 21 months working in news media.

Beyond lacking any Arab or Muslim voices in the newsroom, an issue I had identified to myself long before the October 7 attacks, the response from a “journalistic” standpoint was to be overly apologetic to however Israel responded to the attacks, while immediately casting doubt on the veracity and sincerity of those protesting on behalf of Palestinians – with meetings that would instruct just short of verbatim to view pro-Palestinian protesters as those using an opportunity to be antisemitic.

And let me be clear – I absolutely abhor antisemitism. As someone who is firmly anti-war and dreams of an egalitarian world for everyone, I’m more than well aware of the objective dangers Jews around the world have faced in wake of the October 7 attacks, with antisemitic attacks and incidents skyrocketing to truly frightening levels.

Yet it’s the response in the media to how the war and genocide has affected discourse on the conflict that has greatly fallen short. Any basic understanding of history would lay bare the reality that extremism only breeds more extremism. Hell, it’s my 30th birthday and I’m old enough to remember how prolonged conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq only increased anti-American and anti-Western sentiment throughout the region while allowing even more extremist and hardline groups, such as the Islamic State, to gain traction.

Tragically, on both sides of this conflict in the west, people have launched indiscriminate, lone-wolf attacks seeking to inflict collective pain, terror and fear onto both Jewish and Palestinian individuals – and the longer this persists, more people on both sides will be radicalized into violence – not sheerly by propaganda or exposure to different media, but by their own life experiences.

The coverage surrounding the Middle East crisis was wildly irresponsible when I worked at NBC, and it ultimately was due to much more than just the lack of a Muslim or Arab voice in the newsroom. It was taking the increasingly right-wing Anti-Defamation League’s statements as fact and gospel while ignoring the impressively large roster of academics who have spent their lives studying the Middle East in our coverage.

It was coverage that presented “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” as a statement that encourages the genocide of Jewish individuals while not once making an effort to provide deeper context to a phrase that doesn’t say anything close to what viewers were being told it does.

It was coverage that portrayed protests surrounding Michael Rapaport’s comedy performances as protests against a Jewish person performing stand-up comedy, while willfully ignoring the extensive history of racist, violence-inciting comments Rapaport has made regarding Palestinian people.

Perhaps the greatest offense to me was a propaganda tour stop made by Chicago’s Israeli consulate to all the television newsrooms in the city, pulling out all the stops to regurgitate genocide-supporting propaganda that did everything it could to sanewash the collective punishment Israel has carried out on Palestinians not just since October 7, but since the establishment of the state and corresponding Nakba in 1948 – which saw the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from the Levant.

Needless to say, I would rather have eaten a steaming pile of Luna’s shit than to hear a single millisecond of genocide propaganda.

And here’s where I will have to live with regret for the rest of my life, because I didn’t speak out about this to anybody in the newsroom, other than expressing my discontent with a co-worker that I trusted. I figured if I raised this concern to anybody with power in the newsroom, I would be labeled as biased and antisemitic and would be barred from covering the issue at best, and likely fired if not. This was of course despite the fact that there were several openly Zionist voices in the newsroom – Jewish and non-Jewish – that greatly shaped the station’s coverage on the issue. At the end of the day, I felt I only had a lot to lose if I had raised these concerns.

The second Trump regime beginning just over a year later solidified that there was no amount of work-life balance that would make continuing to work in corporate media tenable for myself. Luckily, timelines collided, and Kathleen was well into the process of finding a job as a professor. By the end of 2024, we knew where our future would take us – she would begin as an Assistant Professor at California State University, Chico in August 2025, and I would leave NBC Chicago the month prior to begin our new life.

–

From as young as I could remember, I had always idealized living in California. It was something about watching west coast baseball games late at night as a kid, being exposed to Nickelodeon kids media that portrayed the state as this perfect, idyllic place and just hating cold weather that made me feel like that was the place I always wanted to be.

Of course, kids latch on to a certain place and idealize it all the time, so even I didn’t give that much thought as I got older. I couldn’t stand the cookie-cutter suburb that I grew up in and always talked about needing to leave Illinois, but my feelings on that greatly changed after I moved into Chicago itself after college – and fell in love all over again with the greatest city on this planet.

For a while, it never seemed like living in California was a real possibility, and it certainly wasn’t one I had entertained much on my own or even early on in my relationship with Kathleen. Chicago was already expensive enough, and the major metropolitan areas in California make Chicago’s cost of living look like a true bargain. I honestly felt like if we weren’t going to move north of the border, Chicago was as good as it would get.

With that being the expectation, the growing stress I was under while at NBC had me thinking about what I really want to get out of a career, and what actually makes me feel fulfilled in life – especially as someone who spent so much of my adolescence depressed and petrified of the future.

Ultimately, the things that are fulfilling in life is everything behind closed doors at home – my wife, my dog, keeping in contact with my family and close friends – that’s ultimately what life should be about. So many things are out of our control, and I felt like I had made incredible progress with all that was in my control. For the first time in my life, I really did feel fulfilled.

And it wasn’t just because of my career. I mean sure, I don’t think I’d feel this level of satisfaction and fulfillment had I not come across the lucky breaks of being discovered by a TV producer at age 14 and using that to get a job a decade later, along with just being lucky enough to work in such a competitive industry while skipping any work in a small-market station.

Beyond the luck, there were plenty of moments in my news career where I really felt I was doing something – getting breaking news updates out to the public during life-threatening storms, covering and analyzing the 2023 Chicago mayoral election and getting to talk about the Cubs on a network podcast for two years in a row. But those things were only made possible by both the support I received from my family, and the stability and fulfillment that came with having something I could always look forward to when coming home.

–

I try not to think about luck too much, because it has me thinking that something is going to go terribly wrong when I think of how lucky I am with how my life turned out. But if there’s one thing I’m eternally grateful for receiving with my life experiences, it’s perspective – knowing to never take anything for granted, and that a single moment on any given day can change our lives forever.

That can come in many different forms. I had no idea that losing a friendly bet while playing Crash Team Racing would lead to me to stop eating meat and become a pescatarian, which I have been for over eight years now. Yet it can also come in the form of a mysterious headache turning into a life-altering health crisis that exposed four brain aneurysms – as it did for my mother in February 2009. The headache that started for her on Feb. 1, 2009 has never stopped.

Working in the news only reinforced this way of thinking for me – I’ve covered countless stories of innocent children and elderly individuals losing their lives to a stray bullet while minding their own business. Families vanishing in the blink of an eye due to a catastrophic car crash. Futures of dozens of people being wiped out again and again with senseless mass shootings occurring in every corner of the country.

It goes without saying that as I write this at the age of 30, there were many times where I doubted that I’d even get to this day. Whether that was due to the severe depression and anxiety I weathered a decade ago or to an expectation of just being really unlucky once, I have always moved through life as if there are no guarantees. Because there aren’t. I wake up every day knowing that it could be the last day for myself or any family member and close friend – and it’s that mindset that I constantly remind myself to stay in, to never take a single moment for granted.

Because holy fuck, I’m a really lucky person. I’ve gotten to travel to four different countries, 34 U.S. states, have started an extensive physical media library of over 1,000 items with my wife, have a loving wife and dog to fall asleep with every night and I now get to write about whatever I want to in the most beautiful state in the country – a scenario my wife and I worked extremely hard to make happen, and one we’re both incredibly happy with.

And to me, that’s fulfillment. I don’t need to entertain myself with outdated definitions of masculinity that tell me that if I’m not the breadwinner or working a traditional job that what I’m doing is useless. I feel incredibly fulfilled with everything I did in my professional career, and feel equally as fulfilled with what I get to do now. Write on my own terms and create something from scratch that’s fully mine – something I only dreamed of doing as a kid. Now, it’s what I look forward to when waking up every day.

In an age where the internet is seemingly filled to the brim with AI-generated slop, simply bringing real material into the uncertain world we live in is something that not only I feel I can do well, but that a few people may even seek out and need.

I’ve had this website since late August, and have totaled just under 6,800 total views and a little under 3,900 total visitors – this clearly isn’t a blockbuster, and my $4.45 of ad revenue would prove that this isn’t a money-making endeavor. But if I’m able to bring something interesting, thought-provoking or frivolously fun to just one person on this planet on this uncertain timeline, then I’m more than fulfilled.

I don’t know where the next 10 years will take me or the world, or if I’ll be there to write about it. What I do know is I’m one of the world’s luckiest people, and I look forward to writing whatever comes to mind to keep myself and hopefully a few other people out there level-headed and distracted about something fun as long as I stay here.

To me, that’s the life that ultimately was attainable, and it’s a life that’s been incredibly fulfilling – independent of whatever career title defined me for the moment.