So, I’m sitting here at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf waiting for STR’s Masters Series tonight. I’m listening to music on my iPhone while typing on my new MacBook Pro. I never thought I’d be the biggest Apple fan around. I used to despise Macs. Not anymore. My life has changed through Apple’s technology... for the better... All this change has occurred within the last year.

Do you ever think about how different your life is now vs. how you thought it might turn out?

On Friday night a good friend and I went to see Cloverfield on the lot at Paramount Studios. Whenever I go to Hollywood (or Burbank) and find myself around the “industry”, I feel a bit melancholy. I always dreamed about working in the entertainment industry in some capacity. No, not in front of the camera or the mic, but behind it, recording and mixing music or working on films in some fashion. I even spent a little time working in the industry. I worked in the production office of “The Price is Right” for several years and spent a whopping month working at a film audio editing facility, Soundstorm. Working at “Price” was fun, but there was no real future for me there. The reason my time at Soundstorm was so brief was that I found myself working 90 hour weeks as a runner, met too many stressed out, overly medicated editors, and saw the supervising editor’s family come to visit him at work since they never saw him at home. I wanted something else... Sometimes I think that I was more in love with the idea of Hollywood than the reality of it. Hollywood is all smoke and mirrors. It does have a lot money though...

So, here I am, close to a decade later, working for a Christian ministry (something else I never planned on doing) with a lovely, beautiful, caring, compassionate wife and two of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. I guess this just goes to show you that the things you want at different times of your life are seldom the things you actually need. I didn’t need to work in the industry. I wanted to work in the industry. I needed to have a family that loves me and that I love. I needed to be a husband and a father. Sometimes, I fail at being those things, but I’m trying. I want to do those things now. It’s amazing how long it sometimes takes for us to reconcile what we really want and what we really need.