a head of shattered dreams. john lackey celebrates a birthday today. born in 1978. just like me. twenty four years old. just like me. but what is he doing on his birthday? he's pitching in the world series. on his twenty fourth birthday. what did i do for my twenty fourth birthday? hell if i know. it sickens me to hear of all these teenage prodigies making millions. usually in sports. but also in the real world. i'm gonna totally ignore the kobes and garnetts of the world. i mean, they deserve to make millions of dollars. they're abnormally tall.



but for some reason, seeing some guy just a few months younger than me, starting on the mound for the world series, puts my life into proper perspective. i think i thought that i would've been a millionaire by twenty five. or was it thirty? that was maybe seven years ago, when i was young and stupid (as opposed to now, when i'm not so young and still stupid). at this rate, i'll be lucky if i can get to financial ground zero by twenty five. woe is me. well, not really. but still. twenty four. pitching for the baseball championship of the world. damn. is the grass greener on the other side or what?



funny story. well no. not funny. but true. in third grade, while talking to one of my friends in the cafeteria, i bet him that my dad had a million dollars. this being the height of my FOB-dom, i really had no clue how much a million dollars was, but i was sure my dad had it. (total tangent: strangely enough, the height of my FOB-dom coincided with the height of my popularity. which is kind of weird. i was seriously pretty cool in third grade. all my friends were the uber-cool people, thus making me cool by association. it was all downhill as my english improved however. damn america. anyhow.) this kid, the so-called friend, insisted that my dad didn't have a million dollars. of course, he was right. i had to go home, ask my dad how much a million was, and then concede the point that we probably didn't have that much. very humbling experience. but now, nearly sixteen years later, i know how much a million is, and i'm not so sure i'll see that many zeros in the near future. but hey, stranger things have happened. let's just hope it happens to me.



i'm out like the fat kid in dodge ball. (that's a nanaba saying, i'm just borrowing it)