No regrets
June 26, 2002
Five years ago I was finishing up my last summer (or so I thought) at my place of enduring high school employment, Play it Again Sports. I may or may not have been desperately trying to get Dave Hwang to forego living in the dorms in favor of an apartment off-campus with me. I believed, on the advice of a clueless housing official, that I had no chance of procuring on-campus housing. I was watching a lot of tennis (Wimbledon) on TV. So, what would I do differently if I was suddenly transported back to that time to live it all over again?
I'll get the obvious stuff over with first. I would have borrowed as much money as possible and invested in some key stocks. In particular, Yahoo, eBay, and Red Hat. I would have been sure to sell all those stocks well before January 2001. I would have taken a lot of that money and found a bookie in Vegas to put it all on Mark McGuire being the first to hit >61 home runs in a season. I would not have taken Technical Writing at first period (7:25) on Wednesdays my first semester at UF.
Other than that, I can't say I would do anything differently. In fact, I would prefer not to have the opportunity to change things, for fear of diverting the blissful, meandering path my life has taken thus far. Suppose, knowing that I would one day marry Kim, my lack of anguish and desperation towards her would make me too smug and overconfident, keeping her from ever falling in love with me. Suppose I chose to avoid legal entanglements resulting from an apartment flood and moved into North Hall a year early. Kim and I would have had much less privacy during the early parts of our relationship, and it may not have blossomed the way it did. Suppose I had not slacked off in classes my freshman year, and had performed as well that year as I did the next three. I may have been admitted into Stanford or Berkeley's Ph.D. program, and Kim would have missed out on the fantastic theology program here at Notre Dame.
My life, especially in the past five years, has been blessed with innumerable good things, each of which seem so unlikely that the smallest change (such as having five extra years of experience), could blow them all away. Frankly, I don't really see how doing it all over again would really improve things. I'd rather not take the chance. Not even for dot-com millions.