Great Personal Anticlimaxes

1. Moving to Eugene, Oregon. I was a kid. I spent the preceding weeks sick as a dog with something my family called "Christopher Disease" (bear in my mind that my dad was a doctor.) I woke up one day and we lived in Eugene instead of the little logging town in which I had grown up.
2. Playing a concert at the WOW Hall in Eugene. As a high school freshman, I had thought that if I could just be in a band that played the WOW (that would be "Woodworkers of the World," a former union hall converted into a concert venue) Hall, my 14 year-old punk rock fantasies would be fulfilled. Thirty minute sets go quickly, though, and it wasn't quite the underground rock n' roll fantasy I'd dreamed of.
3. Freshman year in college. For some reason I thought there would be more cool people at the giant idiotic sports school I went to. In the end, all of my friends were through the music scene; some were also college students, but that was just a coincidence.
4. My year in England. It turns the two-tone ska and street punk stuff I loved was a generation out of date by 1999.
   
5. Quitting all of my jobs in Portland. I hated those fucking jobs, but every time it was just "have lunch, receive a pat on the back, leave."
6. Finishing my PhD. Plan C overshadows the doctorate, to begin with, and getting a doctorate is such a cumulative process anyway that by the time you end, you've been almost done for a long time already. Also, having precisely no academic prospects puts a bit of a damper on earning a highly specialized degree that only lends itself to academic prospects.

Happily for me, getting married and having a kid were both wonderful, climactic things. It's weird to think that my major accomplishments fit so neatly into the standard script, but there you have it.