I took the stairs two at a time, springing from the Poynter Institute's great hall with its marble tile, up onto the green carpet of the second floor. I walked into the newsroom, head down, following the path to my chair.

I saw the blue envelope on my keyboard, propped against the plastic housing of the monitor. It contained a birthday card from my mom.

The one she said she might send. It came two days before my 30th birthday.

The other Poynter fellows would never guess on their own that I am 30. The gray doesn't show too much and I'm blessed with boyish looks, but 30 haunts me. I can't rid myself of thoughts of failure.

I am 30 and hunting for a career. Thirty and according to Dugan Arnett, eight years my junior, "Flirty and thriving."

Flirty? Hardly. Thriving? I'm not so sure. Do I have time to learn the things I need to know? I don't have as many years to make mistakes and bounce around. I feel like time is a greasy pig that I can't pin down.

Go back nine years...

It's May and I'm 21. Fresh graduates pour from the shadows of Miami University's Millett Hall. I hold a bachelor's of science in business under my arm (or at least the red folder in which it goes). It is what Miami awarded me after four years, a 2.95 GPA, a major in operations management and a fat D in my last class: Acting for the non-major.

Mike, my best friend, finds me. He's giddy to be graduating and I shake my parents in order to start the celebration.

We share another beer, tell jokes, laugh and embellish familiar tales, but we know that it's time to go. Time to run off to new places, build careers, get engaged, plan weddings and have families. I lived all of those things.

Skip ahead five years...

It's the dog days of summer, August in Ohio. I'm 26 and sitting in what was a dentist's chair with a man simply known as Jack pointing the business end of a needle gun at my right shoulder.

"This won't hurt," he says.

He makes chit-chat, spinning stories about weird tattoos in odd locations on his other clients. I guess that he wants to settle my nerves before my first session in his chair.

Jack's neck bears faded, inky flames. Colorful, eye-popping birds perch on his forearms, spider webs stretch across his elbows and blanketing every inch of visible skin from his chin down is an assortment of patterns, words, animals and an occasional dagger.

"Some guy wanted the Beatles Abbey Road album cover across his ass cheeks," he says. "What a freak."

Jack snaps his gloves on, primes the gun with the green ink we selected and takes his position beside me. He presses his weight onto my shoulder and plants the ink into my freckled skin.

Just a month earlier I stood in a courtroom ending my three-year marriage and a decade-long chapter of my life. The divorce was a blessing, but even blessings are served with aches.

Now I sit in that shop on High Street, two blocks from Ohio State University, lost, alone and trying to forget the rapid needle poking my arm. The name of Jack's parlor is Fate.

The green tattoo, a Celtic symbol representing birth, adulthood and death resides on my shoulder. Looking at it in the mirror at the shop, I am reminded of all the times I was told that I wear my heart on my sleeve. Now it bleeds down my arm.

Jack had lied. The little green symbol, the cycle of life, hurt a lot.

Eight months later...

It's April, I'm 27 and as I exit the highway a leaden ball sinks in my stomach. It's 6:30 a.m. and Honda looms. I pass the half-mile-long factory and follow an access road to my office building.

Almost three years earlier, I drove this road outside of Columbus, Ohio, on my first day at Honda. I had moved from Chicago. At that time I was married, thinking about having kids, plotting when to buy a house. But those turned out to be someone else's dreams. Now writing consumes my thoughts. I want to tell stories, and find the place where I fit in.

I clock in and walk to my cube, an economical 4 feet by 4 feet and crammed with papers, pens, notebooks, reminders, binders, a computer and an assortment of bulky car parts.

I sit, sigh, and look around as my PC boots. I see that I am appointment-free and I know today is the day to talk to Todd, my boss.

"Todd, do you have a minute?" I ask after the morning meeting.

"Sure JD, what's up?" he asks with an amused expression as he strokes his walrus of a mustache.

Over cups of burnt coffee I spill my guts. I tell him that I am going to go back to school in a month. Stunned, Todd sits still for a moment.

"Okay. I'm a little shocked. What do you plan to do?"

"I think I am going to be a journalist."

He laughs hard. I laugh too. Todd slaps me on the arm and somehow everything feels OK.

I speed away that afternoon, racing across Route 33 toward Columbus, thinking about the future and the past. I think about what lies ahead. And about what I left behind: three states, an ex-wife, three jobs, two cats, three cities, seven apartments and the buried memories of six years.

Jump ahead 15 months...

It's a steamy summer in Washington D.C., I'm 28 and I have the afternoon off from my internship at Knight Ridder's Washington bureau. I find myself waiting in the lobby of the Washington Post for George Solomon. He's the former sports editor of the Post and currently the ombudsman for ESPN.

"Do you want to meet him? It certainly can't hurt," Mike had said a couple days earlier. Mike knew of Solomon through his ever-connected wife, Laura, who as things would have it, worked with Solomon's wife.

Solomon springs from the elevator and ushers me upstairs to his office. He's hard to follow in the warren of cubicles and desks.

He moves through our conversation like an interview, pointing out my flaws and miscues while slathering me with advice.

I had not brought my resume along. He asks for it. I tell him I didn't realize I should have brought it.

"Never say that," he exclaims.

"Always read at least the last two weeks of every newspaper you interview at."

"Bring clips with you."

"What books have you read lately? And be able to tell me why you read them."

"Read the New York Times, the L.A. Times - and the Wall Street Journal. Great journalism and writing in the Wall Street Journal."

"Never ask for an address or how to spell a name. If you have to ask me for that, I am going to think, 'What else am I going to have to walk him through?' "

"Take any position in the sports department. Answer phones. Get coffee. Do anything they ask.

"Can you find your way back downstairs?" he asks.

I think it is the only question he asked that he expected an answer to. Solomon doesn't bother to walk me out. I say yes and stumble through the sports department for 10 minutes looking for an elevator, any elevator.

I stand in the lobby dazed. I feel like I took a blind punch to the gut and I want to curl up into a ball and moan. I feel like a clean-up hitter looking dead red for a fastball who buckles at the sight of an off-speed pitch. I feel like the goat instead of the hero.

I surrendered one life to pursue this one - to be a journalist - but nothing feels certain, solid or reachable.

Two birthdays later...

I'm 30. I'm a writer and I'm trying to be a journalist. I'm 30 and it might as well be eight years ago when I collected my first degree from Miami and wondered where do I go from here.

I'm 30 and I'll leave Florida soon. I have more experience now; I'm smarter than I was six weeks ago; I'm a few miles farther down the path. But I don't have a job. My savings have dried up. The recruiters who spoke to me at Poynter's career fair appeared unimpressed. I wonder how much longer I can bounce.

For me, time jogs instead of crawls. I don't have another eight years to stand in the back, looking around.

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