Saturday Night in West Chester

If you are going to live on the corner of Gay and High Street, you pretty much get to the point where you can tune out the sirens of cop cars, fire trucks and ambulances, especially on weekend nights. I mean, it's not like living in Manhattan or anything, but count on hearing a lot of noise between 11:00 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. Good thing I'm usually up either watching SNL or cartoons on Adult Swim, so it rarely wakes me up. Well, sometimes I crash out early, and if I get waken up by the street noise, forget going back to sleep for the next few hours. Did you know there are many ways to buy real estate for no money down? I do, thanks to my erratic sleep patterns.

So, what was the deal with this tonight at 12:30 a.m.? Who knows...some Axe slathered, spikey haired douche with 'roid rage says something about his fake boobed girlfriend to some other Axe slathered, spikey haired douche with 'roid rage and the next thing you know every cop on the night shift converges on the joint to sort things out.

Happens every weekend.

Do I care? Look, I like living in a town with night life, heck I can't complain, it would be like building my house at the end of the thresh hold of 09R at O'Hare and then complaining about the jet noise. Still, is a little civility not in order? Greater minds than mine have contemplated the issue, so there's not much I can add.

There's going to come a point, where I'm going to want to live in quieter neighborhood, you know, when I have the whole wife and kid action, maybe even out of the town all together, but not yet, I'm not ready (I mean I'm ready for the whole wife and kid thing) to give up the convenience of town, the charm, and yes....all the pretty lights.....

There there, West Chester, it's gonna be alright...

First all, Happy New Year!

So I got lucky again! What are the odds that for the second time this season, the one day it snows in town I've got the day off? I got to walk around town, get a few errands done since after all I patronize (you know,the good kind of patronize) all the local businesses in town, and snap a few pictures. A quiet blanket of snow envelopes town on this Monday after the Eagles NFC loss, as if to comfort those who's entire identity is intertwined with the fate of a professional sports team. I imagine the conversation at work will be around what could have been, but life will go on.

After all, tomorrow, at 12:00 PM, it all changes right? In my world, things have been changing for a while, and I've got to be thankful that in some respects, the change has been manageable. Compared to what is happening to my friends and former colleagues at Merrill Lynch, my situation seems pretty well stable, knock on wood.

I guess I'm saying change is incremental and perpetual as opposed to huge paradigm shifts that occur overnight. Sure, there are some things that change things instantly, "I'm pregnant", "We're going to let you go", "Grandma's dead", but the best kind of change is the kind we initiate ourselves. When we're ready for change, we change. Nobody can push you into change, but we can be inspired to change. The onus is still on us to change, but there are some certainly inspiring people out there that can show the way. Be it Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, Barrack Obama, John McCain, Lance Armstrong or Neil Armstrong, we all need to find something that inspires us to change. You may even want to look in the mirror for inspiration to change, there's no better role model than ourselves...don't you think?