I got to do some catching up last week. Monday, I had lunch with my friend Shari. We went to school together at Ashland, where she was two years ahead of me. She could pretty much do it all when it came to TV stuff. I always thought she'd end up on an anchor desk somewhere (an assumption made because she's pretty), but she settled into a long-standing producer role at one of our local affiliate stations. Late on she bailed and went into a marketing/PR gig for an insurance company, where she was absolutely on the VP-with-perks track.
We've been friends for a long time, though not particularly close. Still, when I worked downtown, we'd hook up for lunch now and then to just keep up. I hadn't seen in her in a couple of years, so when I thought I wasn't working, I agreed to meet her for lunch. The catch? She was moving out of town in a couple of weeks.
Despite the textbook definition of financial and career success, she wasn't the least bit happy with her job. Her action plan was straight forward: Find a market she would like to live in, find something sports related in terms of marketing and/or PR, move there. If she didn't find a gig, move there anyway. As it turns out, she did find the gig, and she's moving right after the new year, working for a firm doing marketing and PR for Indy racing.
I've gotta say, that takes some balls, to up and move with or without a job in this economy. She also managed to sell her condo and not take a bath. I admire her courage.
Later in the week, Cath was in town and we had dinner. We stopped dating almost two years ago now, but it's nice that we can just kind of pick up the conversation where ever it last left off. She's through the hardest part of vet school, going as far as to say that she was bored this quarter.
She's always been kind of transient with grad school and such. So it comes as no surprise that she's always on the move somewhere. She spent last summer in Portland interning and removing sex organs from pets. Her knowledge base of veterinarian medicine keeps getting more enormous, and she even won a trip to Europe with two others from the OSU vet school, paid for by one of the pharm companies.
Vets don't get the same respect that hoomin doctors do, which seems odd considering you need to know a lot of the same stuff, only apply it hundreds of different species. Having been there when she started the journey, I really appreciate the difficulty of achieving a degree in medicine, animal or otherwise. I'm really proud of her for pursuing it, and owning it.
I write about these two people I think because the stories that people have fascinate me, especially the things they're able to accomplish for no other reason than they decide to do it. It's inspiring.
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