Blog

I’ve been working at Shady Brook Farm for two weeks, and I have, without question, worked harder overall than I did in a month at my previous job. On this precious off day, while trying to avoid watching the Bears-Dolphins score on the crawl — we don’t get games like this on TV in Philly, and apparently, it’s looking like my football team’s “Super Bowl run” (eye roll) could suffer some high-degree burns in the Miami heat — I thought I’d write a little about my vocational experience thus far.

Long story short: Holy shit. 

As the cliché goes, if you had told me 20 years ago, or even much shorter ago, that I’d be pouring draft beers, and doing mental math, at a patio bar at age 40…I would have given you the stink eye. (Ha, wait, I mean, I’d give you my normal facial expression.) But that’s not because bartending/cashiering is a dishonorable pursuit, but because I pretty much thought I’d found my lane on the highway of life and was going to ride it, all night long.

Admittedly, I was driving all the way to the right, stuck behind a beater with blinking hazard lights, given that I was a local journalist making less money in 2018 than I did in 2002. But it was what I knew, and what I was good at — had made myself good at, because that’s how I roll — and WHAT THE HECK DO YOU DO WITH YOUR LIFE IF YOUR WHOLE CAREER PLAN LOOKS LIKE A DEAD END? Continue reading “Things will (finally) never be the same” →

“What is your proudest accomplishment?”

It was a pretty amorphous, definitely cliché question, thrown out near the end of the very entertaining hour I spent with Pam Rosanio at Einstein Bros. Bagels in the Summit Square Shopping Center.

But with it, we finally got to the heart of her story.

Pam — I’m going to refer to her on a first-name basis, because even though I only know her via two journalistic interviews, 10 years apart, I feel like she’s my friend, or my sister, and I guarantee that the young girls she works with as a basketball trainer understand what I mean — is one of the top women’s basketball players ever to come out of Bucks County. She played her way into the Archbishop Wood High School and University of Massachusetts record books, then traveled around Europe playing professionally, well into her late-20s. She earned a spot on the Italian National Team in 2015.

She’s obviously proud of all that. But when asked to single out a highlight, she pauses, then goes in an unexpected direction.

“I’ve had agents, or people, tell me I was too fat to play in Italy,” she says. “They said they like this (gestures to her face) but my body wasn’t in good enough shape. And I’m like, ‘I’m playing 40 minutes a game! I might not look super fit, but I will shove you across the floor!’ It’s stuff like that, being told you’re not good enough, and that’s constantly what my career was. I was never the first one of my friends to sign a [professional] contract every year. I was always a late sign. Mentally, it was like they were saying I wasn’t good enough.

“I think with stuff like that, I can relate to girls in the sense that, it’s not super easy, if you don’t have a chiseled body. It’s a thing: people telling you you don’t look a certain way…”

She doesn’t come out and say this, but she lived it: By believing in herself and the abilities she worked so hard to hone, and never letting doubters or perceived obstacles stand in the way of her success, Pam Rosanio created for herself a stellar career in basketball. It’s what makes her, now, a perfect role model for her sport’s next generation. Continue reading “Coffee Convo #2: Rosanio returns to roots as a well-rounded, worldly role model” →

Well, I got up this morning – at 5 a.m., after maybe 3 hours of restless sleep on the couch – and went to work at a job where I can’t sit down and make $13-an-hour less than the more-or-less lifelong job that I voluntarily left.

So Winston Churchill would, I guess, be proud.

He allegedly was the source of the quote in the title. He did a harder job than I ever have done. And he probably didn’t give a sh*t about sports — or, if he did, he didn’t let the outcome of a baseball game, a failure of epic proportions by the best team in the National League, record-wise, all year, move him to tears once, let alone multiple times in a 12-hour span.

But I care too much about my sports, and about pretty much everything in life, so I felt like a big bag of stinking failure walking into work this morning at 6:45. I had cried already for the end of the Cubs’ season, immediately after the Rockies recorded the final out of the NL Wild Card Game, in the bottom of the 13th inning. Several hours later, my second full day working as a cashier in a busy farmers market left me feeling like an even bigger bag of stinking failure. And I guess all the deep-seated emotions, piled on top of the lack of sleep, just got the better of me.

I suppose no one should cry about a minimum-wage job. But as is the case with any breakdown of any degree, it’s never about one thing. It’s a compilation. You’ve spent a long, long time bottling up the pain, anger, sadness, fear, regret, doubt, fatigue, and yes, the actual failure — or maybe even the emotional roller coaster of both successes and failures — that explodes one day when you least expect it. Continue reading ““Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”” →

I had to change the channel briefly after the final out of 163. I don’t know how much of the Brewers’ celebration, on the hallowed grounds of Wrigley Field, ESPN actually showed before switching to the other National League tiebreaker game on the West Coast. But I could not watch a single second of it.

I’d just been on my feet, wildly smacking my hands together in my trademark “Wielgus Clap” that infamously once moved an old woman sitting in front of me at a Cubs home game to rip off pieces of napkin and stick them in her ears. Javy Baez — my favorite Cub, whose quest for NL MVP is effectively over, given Christian Yelich’s recent trajectory for the (cringe) Central Division champions — had just battled his ass off against (bigger cringe) Josh Hader to get on base after an awful, strikeout-filled stretch, and the game’s lone offensive hero, Anthony Rizzo, was up with two outs, representing the tying run in a 3-1 game.

I knew that expecting Rizz to go deep a second time against a (cringe cringe cringe) All-Star hurler (can you tell I’m a Hader hater?) was foolish. But, b*tch please. I watched these guys rally from a 3-1 deficit in the WORLD SERIES in 2016, to win the whole damn mother-effing thing before my very eyes on a (thankfully) rainy night in Cleveland. I also watched David Bote hit a walk-off grand slam earlier this year to turn a Max Scherzer gem into the Nationals’ Death March. And I’ve been a baseball fan for 40 years. Amazing sh*t happens all the time. You gotta believe. Continue reading “Tiebreaker Heartbreak: My tumultuous love affair with the Cubs continues” →

I saw this on Twitter while I was stopped at a red light on my way home from my first official shift as a cashier at the Shady Brook Farm Market, and I laughed out loud. I mean, of course I did; I honed the keen sense of humor you see here (well, maybe not yet...) on Classic “Simpsons” episodes like the one referenced below:

I also kind of feel a little like Homer during my job search. One of the big reasons I decided to throw my hat in the ring for an entry-level job at the farm market, when I haven’t worked in retail since college, is that after two weeks of sitting in my living room, hunting for “white-collar” work on the internet, applying for “white-collar” work on the internet, and having ZERO contact with human beings other than folks at the gym or friends I invite to lunch…I was starting to get pretty discouraged. I remain quite disappointed in this process, and no, I’m not sure I trust it. Continue reading “Employment Chronicles: This is Jen; how may I help you?” →

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Tony Vlahovic vividly remembers sitting in a bed in an Allentown Hospital ward, peppering the doctor with questions after emergency surgery.

“Can I play sports?”

“Can I have kids?”

The terrified teenager had no idea what had happened to him.

Decades later, Vlahovic understands fully.

“What happened was…actually, football saved my life,” he says.

We are sitting at a table at the Newtown Starbucks, during the after-school rush, rehashing every twist and turn of Vlahovic’s remarkable life. His diagnosis of testicular cancer at age 14 — which came a few months after he was hit below the belt in a freshman football game, then woke one night to discover he couldn’t move his legs — was just one harrowing stop on his road less traveled.

He made a full recovery, and now, as a father of two, a rehabilitation specialist, high school baseball coach and Special Olympics baseball crusader, he credits that one hard football hit with helping to expose the cancer growing inside him, before it was too late.

If not for that hit, all the lives Vlahovic has touched since his athletic career ended in the mid-1980s – another harrowing story we’ll get to in a minute – might have been quite different. Continue reading “‘Coffee Convo’ #1: Athletic dreams dashed, Tony Vlahovic goes pro in giving back” →

I’m not yet sure if my new part-time job – which, actually, could end up being full-time, because Shady Brook Farm does a TON of business this time of year, and I can basically sign up for as many hours as I want, now that I’ve officially been hired – allows employees to wear hats that are…off-brand.

But I love that my new work shirt matches my new favorite hat – the Carharrt/47 Brand Bears hat. Ain’t she a beaut, Clark?

I do know that yoga pants aren’t allowed on employees, so I am going to have to run out and buy some professional pants tomorrow. Read: I need new jeans. Considering I have basically been eating and drinking everything I want for a few months now, and I have a 40-year-old metabolism, this is a concerning development.

But, anyway, yes, I have a job at Shady Brook, which is a local institution here in Bucks County. It’s a family-owned-and-operated working farm that has expanded – or, really, exploded – over the past 20 years or so, into a multi-faceted destination for locals and tourists alike. I went on a tour today with one of the managers, and while I knew about some of the farm’s offerings, I couldn’t believe all the ways that the very smart owners have found to expand their sources of revenue. Continue reading “Part-Time People Person” →

One thing about me: I’ve always been athletic. I played three sports in high school – stopping with basketball after sophomore year so I could focus on pitching and club volleyball in the winter – and walking on to the Northwestern University softball team for a Big Ten experience (yes, as a bit of a scrub) that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

In adulthood, I’m partial to the “sport of fitness,” and while I no longer consider myself a serious, competitive CrossFitter, I still belong to a CrossFit gym and do CrossFit-style workouts in my basement nearly every day I’m not working out over there.

My unofficial duty in the gym is to post the Quote of the Week on the board. OK, it’s a duty I more or less bestowed upon myself, but no one else seems into it, and I just love it. Say what you want about inspirational quotes and their triteness or lack of true value in terms of motivating people or effecting change, I love anything that makes me think. Well, maybe not ANYTHING. There are some things I actually would love to stop thinking about, but I digress.

This one spoke to me. I’ve never been a follower. I’ve always done my own thing, and I gravitate toward people like that. In this next phase of my life, where it looks like I’m going to have to hustle my ass off and create my own opportunities rather than just sitting back and doing what is required by a company, day after day, year after year…this resonates especially loudly.