Tomorrow morning, I will have my usual pre-work morning routines. Ride into Manhattan on the usual train. Walk my usual path upon exiting the train… and then deliberately go the wrong way. I imagine such an action will make me smile and giggle uncontrollably, and the people around me in Grand Central will shake their heads at the Monday morning cuckoo bird. Yes… these are the Cocoa Puffs of glory.

It turns out that going the wrong way is actually the right thing. Tomorrow is my first day at my new job. The day that I go from an underpaid cynical 6-year veteran to the F.N.G. with a drastically bigger and better company. I’m under no delusions to expect anything, since I have learned a little too much about corporate structures and how people behave within them.

But that doesn’t change my excitement. It will be good to have a challenge again. To have my brain working on all cylinders during the work day. And work hard. Yes, I said it. I know that unless you win the lottery, become a bum, or invent a pill-cure for obesity, you’re going to be working no matter what. So you might as well make the most of it.

My father mentioned to me in a phone call tonight how he was reading letters that he wrote in college. He remarked at how the voice was similar and yet so unrefined, even cocky. Thus, I imagine that one day in the distant future, I might break out the memory chip that contained all of my blog entries from the early 2000′s. I’m sure the thought of version 2.0 of a Manhattan job beginning will make me chuckle. So I say: Cheers, gray haired Mark… cheers.

I am not one to shy away from a harsh truth, and nothing seems harsher in our daily routines than the world of business and careers. At some point in our lives, we all dreamed about being something special, making a difference, or having an impact in our career of choice. The harsh truth is that for the majority of us, those dreams never become reality.

The lifechanger I spoke about in my last post was indeed career related. Had I been on the negative side of it, I would have posted that harsh truth here and tried to draw some life lesson from it as I always do.

Except it did not happen that way. I did get the job I was trying to get, and it feels pretty damn good to finally be moving up the corporate ladder. I’ve been smiling a lot over the past two days, and it’s not just my usual ‘laughing at the idiosyncracies of the world’ smile. I’m happy. Start your stopwatches…

I would chalk this whole thing up to some crazy luck. But aside from the preparation I put into things, I think it really had to do with my getting married last November. You see, a month ago, I had this flashback of when I was in college, and I was dreaming then about what career I’d be in when I got married.

When that time actually came, I realized that I had become comfortably numb in my dead-end career and I needed a change. I had been focusing so much on Magic Junk, TAGB, the podcasts, and the 2nd novel that I was forgetting about what I spent most of my day doing. Like the job was something I could not get away from.

But I could get away. Now officially, I have. I don’t know what the future will hold for me, or where this path will lead me. Nevertheless, it is a path that does not keep looping in a circle. It took the harsh truth that I was not living up to the dreams of my former self to find the new path.

It’s time to start walking…