| The truth is, I don't get paid to do this. None of us do. Not the coders or the storytellers or the fact crunchers. The catch is, we do it anyway.
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I try to do one thing everyday that I have never done before. Sometimes I succeed--I go to far away places and see amazing things that I could never imagine running into in my hometown. I've spent countless car rides home trying to figure out how I'm going to explain it all in words. There are a thousand stories I have lined up in my head, just waiting for the right words to pen them with.
Sometimes, I fail. I don't even make it out of bed let alone make an adventure out of the day. Other times I am too confounded by real life duties, work, family, love interests, that it is just hard to make a regular day spectacular. Sure, I could squeeze in something new but mundane, but what's the thrill in that. No one wants to hear stories about how I mopped up something gross or blew a tire at 20 mph and had to change it all by lonesome.
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I create unobtainable goals for myself and thrive off of pipe dreams. Someday, I am going to do this, I am going to be that, I am going to go there. Someday.
I am always the most surprised when my plans pan out. Everybody else had faith in me from the beginning.
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When I was sixteen I stood in an empty garage with my father while gutting a house and told him I wanted to drop out of high school. He called it the most foolish thing he'd ever heard from me. I can't begin to tell you how those words broke my heart. What I can tell you is that he also said this, word for word: Em you are going to be a writer. That's how you end up in life.
And I knew he was right. My dad has an erie way of telling the future. It's just one of those things.
The most unobtainable goal I have ever set for myself was living up to the potential my father sees in me.
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I work fast food and while most people see it as a piss-on job, it's actually quite nice. It's not something that I hope to do forever, but in the meantime, with school and youth being my main concerns, it does a nice job of paying the bills and working around my schedule.
I get to stand behind a counter and meet a hundred different faces everyday. Some are nice, some are horrible, some are beautiful, and some are down right laughable. I get to have 90 seconds of conversation with 90 brand new characters every day.
I like to play a game called, "Guess where they are from" Geographically, genetically, mentally. I get to make up who they are and what they are like.
Here is a secret: I have managed to manifest a hundred of you as McDonald's customers. Johnny, Tedd, Jessica, Birch, you have all stared at me from across the counter and you don't even know it. Like any of you would ever eat that crap anyway.
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I can't make this stuff up.
What I can do is give you words, which, at my age, are pretty much all I have in the bank. Thousands and thousands of words.
I can give you fact; I can give you fiction. I can give you fact masquerading as fiction or the vice versa just as easily. You can take my words at face value or save them up and calculate the interest and get something much more than what I put into it.
At any rate, I weave words for you and that is all I have. Take it or leave it. I don't earn a dime for it and in the end, the votes are only for you. I would write even if you never read, even if it never leaves my head.
I take noun verb noun verb and try to give you something tangible. I do real things every day that amaze me. I capture moments in photographs and words and try to share them with you. I do the best I can and in time it may prove to be not good enough at all. Or in time, my dad could be right after all, maybe I do end up the writer.
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