I think I was in high school when the term mid-life crisis first entered our lexicon. At the time it happened to men around 40. With my generation I find the crisis seems to be happening a lot sooner. For me it's 32 and that seems to be close to the same for a fair number of my friends. It doesn't help that here I am at work, another 5 a.m. start, reading the travel journal of a friend of a friend who with his wife decided to quit their jobs and travel around the world for a year. What a pure, amazing adventure. I'm both envious and depressed not just for the two on the trip but it seems every person they've met on their journey leads a life of true purpose and fulfillment. I feel like I lead a life of grinding it out at my job and the prospect of doing this for another 30 years scares the hell out of me. I don't know where I went wrong. I remember I was a freshman in college and my dad told I better chose a major soon. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was working at Summerfest at the time and I asked a coworker what he was majoring in and he said film. It was like an epiphany, who doesn't like movies? So I too majored in film, graduated from Wisconsin, worked construction for 6 months to save up some money and then set off for L.A. For five years I worked at Universal Studios in script development. The movie business is pretty much everything everyone thinks it is. Then, after five years, I moved back to Milwaukee in search of what I thought was a "stable" life. There are times now when I wonder what I was thinking. Now I have that stable life and I'm in the market for my first home but I can't help but think... is this it? I have a longing for something unstable. Reading this travelogue doesn't help things but then I'm tempered by memories of my extended period of unemployment. Something like that will put a scare into anyone. I hope someday to be the guy in the travelogue, if not the traveller, then the guy they met up with who seemed to have life all figured out... but for now, it's just another 5 a.m. start at the office. Only 10 hours to go, then a trip to the library to return some movies, then (if I have the guts) a three mile run in the freezing cold, maybe I'll watch some of the Olympics, and then to bed alongside my beautiful wife. One more day of my life checked off the calendar.