"Dream" Jobs

January 7th, 2010. Growing up it seemed like every year I had a new idea of what I wanted to be when I was older. I remember in Kindergarten we had to illustrate our ideal job. I only remember this because I still have the picture; I wanted to be an animal trainer. Not sure why exactly. I remember for a while though I always wanted to work with animals. Eventually it became a bit more professional, moving from animal trainer to veterinarian. It probably had to do with my love of animals; stuffed animals growing up were my imaginary friends. They were my playmates at home, since my brothers had each other and my mom was very picky about allowing our school friends to come over. Eventually my dream changed to paramedic and then finally to doctor; lawyer, FBI agent, and police officer were thrown in there somewhere, but only for a short amount of time. Its sad to admit but television and movies had a lot of influence on these dreams. Patch Adams showed me what it meant to truly care for the sick; Third watch and ER showed me the excitement of working in a high pressure, busy environment. In college, while I forced myself to stick with my dream of being a doctor and endured all the science courses required, I started thinking that a career that required this much memorization of chemicals and procedures might not be exactly ideal for myself. I started playing around with the idea of entering journalism. I had taken up writing a few times in my childhood, and in one particular English class in college, one assignment make me really consider that I might be in the wrong major. We had to write a poem, and it became my most proud assignment that I've probably ever written. Since then, being a writer as a way to make a living is always in the back of my mind. I feed that hunger with occasionally jotting down the story line to my proposed first novel, or writing a blog with some character, and of course reading example novels and poetry from the masters of the pen.

Currently I am reading James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. The book was a birthday gift from a friend a few years ago and I never touched it until a few weeks ago. Within reading the first page I was hooked. Now there has been controversy with this piece of literature in the validity of the facts of the book, its non-fiction, but either way its a good read. The story itself is a page turned, but the form that Frey uses is what mainly captivates me. I love writing stance that's different from the everyday paragraph and punctuation use. Anyway reading the book got me thinking that a lot of good books come from the authors first person experience in the event that the book was written about. It kind of made me think that the reason why I could not write a good novel is because I have not had that much tragedy in my life.

And then it seemed like that general thinking cause a catastrophe in my life. Its nothing that has personally happened to me, but to my brother but it still affects me in some way. Who knows if it will inspire my first novel, but it does seem to have brought back the dream of studying law. Crazy how things happen.