Category Thirteen: The Random, Wayward Musings of an Unsigned Writer

“Listen when something speaks to you.”

I was told this recently at a journalism conference in St. Louis. However, the impact didn’t truly sink in until I thought about it thirty or forty more times.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. One caveat to this notion is that, in order to be a writer, one must actually write stuff. There is not as much work for non-writing writers as one would think.

How simple could it be, really? If you want to do something, you should do it. This rule applies only to realistic goals. Aiming to be the world’s greatest serial killer or suicide bomber does not fall within this rule’s parameters.

My whole life, my decisions have more or less been spur of the moment. This phenomenon can be traced back to high school and remains consistent to this day.

When I was seventeen, I was dead-set on being an architect. Why? Because the pay was great and I loved to draw floor plans for MTV Cribs-worthy houses on my high school’s Auto CAD software.

One problem I failed to factor in was that I had a tendency to cut corners and finagle things to fit if the measurements didn’t exactly work out. Sure it looked all right, but I’m positive any given homeowner would be pretty upset when half of their million-dollar condo collapsed because of off-measurements and missing floor joists.

Needless to say, when the first day of my technical school was to begin, I slept in and decided architecture wasn’t for me. [Note: this was not the best way to handle this situation] T

Thus, began a year of hard [or maybe not so hard] work as the building sanitation and maintenance engineer for Owens and Associates-- read: glorified and overpaid janitor.

The pay was, in fact, very good, and the hours were flexible, but the job title didn’t provide the prestige I felt owed to me after enduring four years of substandard public education, plus one year of filthy toilets and urinals.

My vast and diversified life experiences thus far at age 18 lead me to deciding the only option was going back to school at an actual four-year university. This plan provided me with more time to figure out just what the heck I wanted to do when I grew up.

When you start college, the first thing they want you to do is to sit down with and adviser and plan out your four year track/debacle. I say this because many times, students get suckered in to programs which require them to enroll in far more credit hours than they need in the process of switching majors, maintaining a full-time schedule and taking relevant classes for their major.

With design officially out of the question I needed to pick something somewhat familiar and moderately interesting. Finally writing fell back into the picture, and journalism major was decided upon [only after taking two years of psychology classes and then switching in].