Work Hard. Play Harder.

This weekend I am actually going to experience the above mantra, drawing my inspiration to do so from what is written below.

Written by a man way more articulate than I’ll ever be on the subject.

“Leaving work to go to a baseball game opens something inside your heart that advertising has been doing its best to lock up. The quest for award-winning work keeps you at work late. The struggle to do better than those around you makes you work through dinner, get up early, cancel the vacation you planned. There are times these sacrifices bear fruit. Mostly they don't. Because greatness at writing ads comes only partly from how hard you work at reaching inside yourself. A greater deal of it has to do with being a person worth reaching into. Leaving work to go to a baseball game is a sign you have taken charge of your life. It's a sign you accept death is coming and have chosen what to do about it for today. It will do you no good to learn to write from your heart if you have nothing in your heart.”

-Mark Fenske, VCU Adcenter professor, linguistic badass

On Friday afternoon I am going to drive the four hours North on I-95 to Newark, DE, home of the past four years of my life, characterized by the mayhem that was my undergraduate career at the University of Delaware.

It’s homecoming, baby. My first one as an alumni. And certainly not something that I ever though would have sprung up on me this quickly. Almost as if I feel asleep at 19 and woke up this morning at 23, dazed like a dream whose details I only vaguely remember.

I am going not only because I feel I deserve a break from what seems like an endless barrage of work, but also because I deserve to be reminded of what got me to this stage in my life in the first place. Spending four years in a place and having met people whom I will forever consider some of my best friends is a pretty significant part of one’s life. All too often we forget this simple truth. Sometimes you just need to take a break from the present, step away from your current life, and go back to where you came from. To see what has made you who you are.

This weekend, stories will be told, laughs will be shared, and undoubtedly, drinks will be drunk. Hopefully not a dangerous amount.

And hopefully I’ll be able to recall a sliver of it all in order to have something to feed my heart for another week of the advertising that will follow.

dubs. out.