My friend Seth thinks I need to find a new job where I'll be happy. No wait - he thinks I need to decide on a career path, instead of being in perpetual limbo. Those were his words. Then he gave me several suggestions: trucking or the mafia. Or selling porn on the internet.

Seth has three jobs. He works as a chef for a catering business, at an opthamologist's office, and as a graveyard shift counselor for troubled teens.

Actually, what he said was if I stopped being so cynical and pessimistic, I might settle nicely into a normal job and NOT hate it.

This frustrates me, apparently everyone I know thinks I hate what I do.

Andrea and my brother were talking about this the other day, she told me. Well, actually they were talking about my blog. And my brother was like, she just needs to find a job where she can blog all the time, then she'd be happy. And then he quickly edited himself, and said something along the lines of: "but then she'd have to blog, and that would make her hate it. I mean, look at her illustration major. She loved art, loved drawing, decided to do it for school. Suddenly she hates it because she has to draw all the time."

Gosh. Be iffy on choosing a major and people think you're indecisive and troubled and don't know what you want.

I didn't want to continue my illustration major because art was something I loved. IS something I love. Somehow, I knew in my gut that if I tried to do it as a career, I would hate it. I would never draw for fun anymore. I would run screaming if people came at me with a sketchbook.

Doesn't anyone understand that? I didn't want to cheapen my completely pristine love of art by commercializing it. I want to "do art" for the sake of art itself, and not for a bottom line or an angry boss or a demanding client, because then it suddenly loses its inherent nature of being art. It's not art anymore, it's a product. Something in me regards my talent in that area as precious, and turning it into a product...cheapens it. And because art is, by it's nature and mine, intrinsically a part of me and who I am, and therefore I feel cheapened. I feel like I'm turning this gift that I have into something...superficial, insubstantial.

Can this make sense to you?

I suppose it's a self-imposed theory that I apply to everything and - can I tell you? - that I don't mind at all doing some menial thing for a menial job. Because the thing is menial itself, I have no problem with it being cheapened by the fact that I'm doing it because I've been told I have to. For someone else. For money. It's something that I'm not attached to, and therefore I have no problem whoring it to the masses.

Maybe that's it. It's just my anti-corporate attitude that needs adjustment. I'm not anti-corporate, though. I don't throw bricks through the Walmart windows, or leave their carts upside-down all over the McDonald's parking lot. I understand that people need things, and that money helps with that and that if we didn't have some sort of capitalist economic system in place most people would be worse off, in theory, because people are selfish slimeballs.

I don't hate people either. Let me clarify. I hate people in groups. I hate people en masse. I hate people as a "society," or as a faction, or as a "community." I love people as a family. I love people wonderfully as individuals, for their inherent uniqueness - nay, divinity - as a person, as a perspective, as a sentient being. I love people. One at a time. I hate people as a "public consciousness."

A group is as smart as it's dumbest member. (This is true.) And there are some awfully dumb people out there. Additionally, many dumb people are unusually loud and vehement about their imbecility.

I dunno. Maybe I am cynical. Maybe it's because I know too many people who treat other people like crap and it's skewed my world-paradigm.

I want to write. I know that for sure. I want to write because words are...words are all-encompassing. Words are like people. And I don't mind selling people to people. I like words because they operate in a structure or outside a structure, and you can make them as conformist or as individual as you want them to be, because either way they have to be filtered through you and in that process of filtering they become yours. I can share words with people. Millions of people can use the words that I use, but none of them will string them up exactly the same way that I do.

But you know how I feel about words.

I've been reading Lenin lately. I don't know why. Someone once gave me a copy of his writings a long time ago, I think it was my World Studies teacher in 9th grade, Mr. Willey. He's one of my heroes. He, if anyone, would be the reason if I ever become a teacher.

Anyway, Lenin... Interesting character, that one. I enjoy reading Lenin because it's fascinating to watch the way he stumbles into truth.

"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle," he says.

I love that. You will be miserable if and when you have nothing to fight for. In the midst of all his cries for political (don't worry, I use that term lightly) revolution, he says so many things that can impact your state of being, if you'll excuse the pun.

I dunno. Read Lenin. Ponder individuality. Don't be miserable. Fight for the things you love, and love things that are right and good.



All the great ones were writers in some form or another anyway...