A Wall Street Banker Turned to Comedy for Happiness and a Career Change
“Wall Street”
This fall I went to the University of Oregon for a master’s degree in business. While my wife and I lived in a small town in Northern California and studied together, my husband was a student at Oregon, just one class down the hall. On nights when he got drunk, or late at night, he began to rant at me about why he didn’t go up to Canada for a job. He told me, “Look, I want to go to Canada. It’s really hot there. I want to learn to do this.”
I didn’t realize how much I missed my husband until I saw him in person. Our apartment was filled with pictures of him in a uniform with his shirt off. His uniform included the gold shield of the law. I realized that I had to be a lawyer. It would be the only thing for which I could ever be happy. In college we spent our days with friends and their families. The one thing that mattered was whether we were happy. I couldn’t find happiness with my husband and I realized I had to find it in my own way. I came to understand that the only way toward happiness was to be true to myself and pursue what I wanted. I began to read.
I read everything I could get my hands on, including books by authors who had also gone to University of Oregon. The books I read about the stock market fascinated me. I followed the stock market obsessively, obsessively, obsessively. At night while I tried to sleep, I looked at charts and read articles. I learned about the markets from the news, from radio, from television, from the newspapers, from the authors I read, from the professors I studied with, and from my books. The stock market fascinated me and it fascinated my husband. He was constantly reminded of how much money he lost on the stock market. It was never something I felt proud of, but I was able to rationalize that I had to go up to Canada to learn the markets. I was learning the markets from the professors at Oregon. I loved teaching but I didn’t feel qualified to teach. I loved the books and it took a long time to read them. I was never able to explain them to my husband. We were too busy trying
