I interviewed for prosecutor positions all over the country.

Miami – 30K salary a year, nope

Sacramento – how far is it from the beach?

Boston – while my favorite US city, 36K, nope

Chicago – would have been cool, second favorite US city, got back to me too late

Queens – drug port of entry, ugly back then, still ugly, will always be ugly

And a ton of other applications to the rest of the 50.

At the end, it came down to Minnesota and Philadelphia.  Minnesota made a lot of sense – higher pay, lower cost of living, presence of a mentor, could actually buy a decent place with a yard, safer (although professionally would have experienced less).

It ended up being Philadelphia for several reasons – I think I was done with the Midwest for a while, wanted to be closer to friends on the East Coast, and a seemingly better chance to find a wife.  I also didn’t want to get talked to anymore at church basketball games.

I attended the Philadelphia Chinatown Church because I thought I would fit in.  Also as stated previously. maybe meet a nice girl.

The girl I lit the candles for was actually relatively close, but I didn’t realize this initially because my sense of geography and direction have always been somewhat limited.  I eventually did.  But I digress.

It didn’t go well.  Apologies to anyone with ties to the University of Pennsylvania, but wow, many of them need to chill out.  You don’t need to be that on all the time.  It’s Sunday!  It’s church!  We do not need a seminar on Guns, Germs, and Steel!  There were a few cute girls, but nothing really fit.  And to be fair, I’m also not much of a looker and charmer.  Also,  not Christian enough.

The straw for me was this Bible study I went to and the leader teaches us that all jobs are depraved.  I told him that mine didn’t appear to be so.  And maybe his job was the depraved one (it did seem awfully boring).  That didn’t go down well.

I do meet a very close and dear friend in the city who was law enforcement who ends up laughing with me over the decades.

Recently, he told me the most recent senior pastor of the church got taken down for attempted child sex solicitation.  We laughed so hard.  Sorry, gallows humor and all that.  

(Nothing funny about sex crimes.  Speaking about depravity, I consider it at times worse than the taking of a life.  We were laughing at the pastor).