I never realized it before, but today is a very special anniversary for me.

Back in grade school and junior high, I took part in a school program called MG. “MG” stood for “Mentally Gifted” – I’m sure that now the program is called something bland and politically correct, like “Learning for Learners” – and more or less, one day a week I would go to the local public school with other nerds from local Philadelphia schools, public and private, and take part in “advanced” learning. While this might sound like we were tackling geometry, learning French or reading Dickens, it was much more of a developmental/life program. For example, we played the Stock Market Game, whereby we were given a certain amount of dollars and then learned how to buy, sell and track certain stocks that we liked (I was very bullish on TOY – Toys R Us – starting in mid-November, and was surprised that it didn’t quadruple like I expected around the Christmas rush). We also each became senators and argued the merits of Title IX on college athletics; I was Jason Mulgrew (D-MT) and was pro Title IX. In addition, we played a lot of Oregon Trail and got stuff thrown at us by the regular public grade school kids when we had lunch in the cafeteria. So that was nice.

(One thing that was cool: the eight grades of my grade school had, say, 600 kids. I think somewhere between three to nine were not white and of either Irish, Polish, Italian or Lithuanian descent. MG was the first time in my life that I hung out with any Jewish, black, Hispanic or Asian people. As you might guess, I hated it.)

(Just kidding – it was nice, and all part of the “development” process.)

Another thing we did at MG was take field trips. We hit all the Philly standards related to the Constitution and Betsy Ross and American history and blah blah blah, as well as Philly’s popular museums. But these were trips that I made with my regular classmates as well, so I didn’t find them that interesting. I liked the other trips, like when we’d visit local colleges (a bunch of eleven year old nerds getting a guided tour of Penn – no pressure there, right?) and when we’d go see, like, plays and shit. But there was one trip in particular that really struck me: when we visited a big-shot Center City law firm.

I remember only a few things about this field trip, which my MG classmates and I took when I was in fifth or sixth grade. But the few things that I remember were that there was expensive looking marble and wood everywhere; everyone was dressed really well and spoke to us very politely; we were served delicious hoagies from a party tray in the most stately-looking conference room I’d ever seen; and the offices were super, super air-conditioned.

And when we left the law firm that day, I had made up my mind: I was going to be a lawyer. People had told me before that I’d make a good lawyer, since I liked to read, talk and try to persuade people. But after visiting that firm, my mind was completely made up – I could certainly do that for the my real-life grown-up job, no problem. Sign me up, please.

As I got older and attended high school and college, I never really wavered from the idea of being a lawyer – not necessarily because I was so committed to it, but because nothing else popped up. Sure, as the memory of that field trip faded, more practical concerns about being a lawyer came to the forefront. For one, I was good at stuff like history, English and Latin, and generally sucked at math and science. Two, being a lawyer and going to law school provided an easy answer to “What do you plan to do with your life?” and give you an extra few years before entering the real world. And three, a law degree meant you would likely always have a job and also make a good living for yourself. It just seemed like an easy choice to me.

But there were two things that, as I prepared to start getting my shit together in college for law school applications, didn’t occur to my nineteen year old self, namely that law school requires a lot of student loans and a lot of work (the first year anyway). In order to attend college, I took out the max amount of student loans that I could. While in college, I was only vaguely aware that these had to be paid back eventually at some point by someone, so the idea of taking on another $100,000 of debt to go to law school didn’t seem like a big deal to me.

As for work, I’ve never really been a big fan of the whole “working hard” thing. If at first you don’t succeed, yeah, maybe you should try once more, but if you fail again it’s probably best to move on and find something you’re better at. Academically-speaking, I figured that GPA was less important that GPA:work ratio. For example, if one could get, say, a 3.5 by doing only the minimum work required, or that same person could put in 40 hours a week of studying and get a 3.8, which is better? If you said the former, you, like me, are awesome. If you said the latter, NERD ALERT!

(Now I admit that I’d always been kind of egotistical when it came to academics – which is funny, because if you’ve read this far in this post, you can tell that I’m not even very smart – so I sort of took for granted those things that came naturally to me and, along with my roommates who were of a similar mindset, celebrated starting a 15 page paper the night before it was due, snorting a bunch of Ritalin, and getting that shit done. To wit, a paper that my roommates and I kept on our fridge senior year – until we got kicked out of housing, that is – was a history paper I wrote for the professor that would have been my thesis advisor if I had stuck around BC for another year. I got a big fat B- and his comment read, “Jason – Stop exploiting your intelligence to serve your laziness.” I nearly wept. That man, at that moment, knew me better than the woman I marry will ever know me.)

But again, the work required in law school and the debt I would incur were not real concepts to me at that point in my life. I only knew that I wanted to be a lawyer forever, that it made the most sense, and that, in the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I should probably start getting my applications ready. In this mindset, on July 22, 2000, I went to the library with only a very mild hangover to take my first-ever practice LSAT.

The test was kind of a pain in the butt, particularly those stupid logic games things. Yet still, when I finished, I thought I’d probably done pretty well. Sure, this was the first LSAT that I had not only taken but also had ever seen, but I was good at these standardized test thingees. No big deal.

And then I graded the test. And just like that, my near life-long dream of being a lawyer was immediately scrapped.

It’s not that I “bombed” it, per se. I did fine, I guess. But ’twas my ego: I went in expecting nothing less than a certain score, a very good score. And when I saw that, shockingly, a had failed in achieving this score by a pretty good margin, well, forget it. Done. Over. All those years of thinking (but maybe never really wanting) to be a lawyer, scrapped because of four hours of that summer afternoon. Fuck it – if I wasn’t smart enough to nail the LSAT on my first try, then law school wasn’t for me. Time to move on.

Childish? Sure. Stubborn? Absolutely. An incredible example of laziness and lack of ambition? Oh, totally. Now’s the part where I’m supposed to say that it couldn’t have worked out better for me; that I have a 9 to 5 job that I like and pays me well enough to spend way too much on cans of beer; that I’m a writer now and I get, like, tons of blowjobs; etc. But that’s not the part that I’m interested in for our purposes.

What if I had gotten the score that I had hoped for? What if I had answer just a handful – maybe four or five – more questions correctly? What if I went with “B” (the correct answer) instead of choosing “C” (the incorrect answer) at the last second?

What would have happened is that I would have likely continued on that lawyer path. I would have taken another practice LSAT, sure, and maybe I would have gotten a lower score that next time, but if I had previously hit the benchmark that I wanted, I would have kept taking the practice tests, all the while gathering recommendations and transcripts for applications. I would have applied and gotten in somewhere, gotten the financial aid together, and gone to law school. Done and done. Lawyer Jason. Welcome to a totally different life.

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Maybe I’m getting contemplative because I just turned 30 (indeed, I was reminded just this week of this LSAT memory by a buddy, because I took this practice LSAT only a few days after my 21st birthday, another “life-assessing/maybe-I-should-get-my-shit-together” birthday). But it’s amazing, those moments that at the time seem rather inconsequential that eventually turn into significant, life-altering events. Or better, those moments that if something had been just slightly different could have changed your life so dramatically. I’m not even talking about those that fall into the death or love categories, like “I was supposed to be on that plane that crashed but slept late” (something I shouldn’t joke about, since I’m taking a red-eye to Boston tomorrow) or “If I hadn’t spilled my drink on her, we never would have started talking.” Talking about this with that college buddy, it just sort of hit me that holy crap, if I had had just the smallest change in just a few questions, I would be something quite different than I am today. Shit is deep, man.

(And if you want a moral that’s not that deep, here you go: When in doubt, take the path of least resistance. It’s better to spend your time eating ice cream on the couch than working hard at something, since shit will just figure itself out in the end. Promise.)