I've had three careers in my life and learned a lot of things that I don't even remotely need to know about anymore. I sweated blood, stayed up late night after late night, studying and memorizing and practicing to not only learn, become proficient in, but to excel in them. And now, and now ... none of them matter at all. I might as well never have bothered. I probably would have been happier, have had a better life, if I had never gotten involved with any of them.
Wait, I don't know about that, especially my first career. That one, my academic career, was 
the one I wanted and dreamed about achieving since I was, I guess, in the sixth grade. And that's the one that came crashing down first and hardest -- dreams do die hard.The Navy paid for my schooling, in exchange for which I owed Uncle Sam a fairly large number of years of my life. But I was fine with that because after graduation I would be continuing the research that I was interested in, knew a great deal about and very good at doing. But, alas, that research program was defunded.
Poof! Gone. But since I was an indentured servant, so to speak, I couldn't just go looking for a similar research job at another institution. So, owing years of my life to the big blue machine, and considering that my mother had been an army nurse and my grandmother a navy nurse, I opted to go in that direction and black shoe it. Big mistake. What I was trained and assigned to do was just too much for me. I've written about that episode in my life, as much as I ever care to, and only now strive to forget it.
So I took my father's advice and applied for and was accepted at OCS then SNA and joined the brown shoe navy, which suited me much better, clean and simple in its way, 
emotionally neutral. I would still be doing that job today except that I had some health problems that led to my separation. Like they say, you may love the navy, but the navy doesn't love you back.So anyway, all those years of my life, all that effort, all that striving, all that money spent and the end result: nothing.
What brought these musings about? Oh, I came across some old training materials for stuff that I put all my effort into mastering, and it was not easy, but I did it, and today ... totally irrelevant to my life now and forevermore. Then I thought about how things went before that and before that ....
Oh, well.
What's my job now?
"Mom!"
"What?"
"Mo-om!"
"What!?"
"He's pulling my hair!"
"Stop pulling your sister's hair!"
"I wasn't pulling her hair, she's a fibber!"
"He was, too!"
"Well, whatever you're doing, young man, stop it this instant. And you, young lady, find something to do away from your brother. Don't make me come over there."
"But --"
"You heard me!"
The job suits me and I'm content with it.
No, really. I am.
