Writers are special people. Except for the fortunate few who can afford to live on a farm in the Netherlands and write 19th century pastoral poetry, most writers aim to please. That is, we write to sell. And writing to sell means being commercial. And being commercial means selling out. And selling out means not being a “real” writer who composes lovely haikus on milking Holsteins, but being a craphole writer who turns to Wikipedia to research Dutch cows and who seeks external validation in the form of dollar bills. Preferably big dollar bills. If we’re lucky, Hamiltons.
As writers, this is the source of all our issues.
The brain of a writer contains a huge tropical storm of garbage, sprinkled with a few tiny nuggets of treasure. Not unlike high-functioning schizophrenics, writers spend countless hours mining their own psyche for bits of inspiration. Sometimes the writer’s mind can yield great things. Most times, however, it’s just a repository for shameless self-indulgence. For example, a sampling of my random thoughts from today: “I just don’t get eyebrows. It’s like an island of hair on my face.” / “Stop staring at the fridge: you just ate two steaks an hour ago.” / “How much do egg donations go for these days? How many months of rent is that?” / “Why can’t human beings have three separate holes, two for waste and one solely for reproduction?” / “Who will ever love me???” / “Fine, go treat yourself to some ice cream.”
Some might think I’m crazy, but I ain’t. I’m just a writer. And most writers are a little crazy. A little eccentric. A little smelly. We fancy ourselves to be high-minded, beret-wearing hipsters who create Art & Culture, complete with a showy vocabulary and a penchant for the Ironic (and unnecessary capitals). But really, we’re just hiding from the truth. And the truth is, most of the time, we believe that we are terrible writers. We believe that we create literary fecal matter that would be better served lining horse stalls than being read or performed by anyone other than our immediate family puppets. Writers are nothing if not neurotic. We’re flighty, we’re flaky, we’re strange, and we enjoy wallowing in our many insecurities.
Writers always worry about whether we’re being smart enough/profound enough/funny enough for an audience that will never be wholly satisfied. We slave over word choice and act breaks and storylines that may seem insignificant to everyone else but which causes us devastating internal turmoil and despair. We edit and re-edit. We second-guess our second guesses. We frequently pull avada kedavras on our computers in stylistically-imbalanced fits of rage. CTRL-A-Delete. CTRL-A-Delete. CTRL-A-Delete. And in addition to churning out daily doses of horsewallpaper, writers find numerous ways to procrastinate. Whether it be cigarettes, alcohol, armed robbery, or gummy vitamins (my personal preference), all writers must find a vice upon which to blame all their troubles if things do go awry.
But then one day, amidst the haze of smoke, drugs, guns, and folic acid, something amazing happens. The cloud of mediocrity floats away, taking with it the banal dialogue and the unnecessary plot twists. The sky opens up. The story becomes strangely clear. Suddenly we’re left with something that, despite all its previously-ulcer-inducing pockmarks, actually seems… good. And we truly believe, that after all this time, after all we’ve been through, we’ve finally managed to produce something that could be considered great — nay, brilliant.
And then we wake up the next morning, and we think that it’s crap again. CTRL-A-Delete.
Such is the life of a writer.
(I think you’re the bestest and I want to be with you forever and ever and say things like “Hehe” even though it’s completely unnatural, but it’s okay because I love you.)
(I genuinely enjoyed my time with you. And I’m not crazy.)
(And now I’m going to introduce a banal topic to continue this sentence so that I don’t have to let you know how I actually feel about seeing you.)
The Corolla was an abominable car. Its body was pinkish-grey, which made it look like a giant tongue on wheels (a tongue from the mouth of a lifetime smoker with severe halitosis). A black rubber line ran across its midsection, as if having a ghetto racing stripe would somehow make a pink Toyota Corolla more stylish. Even though my dad admitted that the car looked like Pepto-induced-vomit, he argued that the ugliness of its exterior didn’t matter as long as it could still do its job. Like Dirk Nowitzki. So I ended up driving the Pepto monstrosity to school every day, all while trying to convince myself that having a car that looked like a blackened lung was marginally better than having no car at all.
The common stereotype is that Asians are cheap, and this is true of my family. My parents have always been bargain shoppers. My mom’s proudest moments include the birth of her two kids, followed by finding a $120 dress on sale for $19. My dad has a similar philosophy, which results in him typically looking like the clearance rack at a TJ Maxx. And even though my brother and I try to avoid the quasi-homeless look that constitutes my dad’s fashion sense, we’ve both become allergic to buying anything full-price. I bought a full-price shirt from Banana Republic once — I stared at it in my closet for two hours before going to return it the next day.
Of course, I’m talking about Kim Jong-Il, the jolly yet combustible man-who-always-wears-sunglasses-and-would-be-a-great-Oakley-spokesman-if-he-weren’t-a-ruthless-Communist-dictator. It all started right after Thanksgiving with 
It all started in the fourth grade. Everyone in my elementary school was required to take “Band” as a class, which meant that for two days a week, we would gather in the auditorium and blow into rented instruments for an hour. The band director, Mrs. E, was a very nice, regal woman with ’80s hair and a penchant for wearing short-sleeved tops. She was also a fantastic conductor who would vigorously direct our rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as if she were Leonard Bernstein.
Jiggly underarms on their own were not that uncommon in my town. But this case was different. What made it all so fascinating to me was that Mrs. E was not a large woman. In fact, she was rather petite. And so her fleshy flappers became an invitation into scientific inquiry, into exploring the unknown. How did they come to be this way? Was it just an anomaly? Or was it some kind of physical manifestation of irony, or a big F-you to biology, or an acknowledgment of an extraterrestrial presence? Seriously, what the hell happened here?
On other days, I feel like an honest-to-goodness nutcase. I’m a meager also-ran, something that never quite lived up to the hype, like fungus, or acid rain, or JaMarcus Russell. I can’t write. I can’t tell jokes. I can’t slowly corrupt the hearts and minds of the general public. Someday, somewhere, I’ll end up shuttered in a small studio apartment, typing away as my cats nibble on my toes because I haven’t fed them in two weeks.
Of course, it’s exhilarating to live a crazy, volatile, follow-your-ridiculous-dreams kind of life. For now, I’m OK with the fact that my bipolar writerly life sometimes involves me eating ice cream in bed, watching House Hunters on repeat, and feeling like a failure. But I’m banking on having more good days than bad ones. And if that’s the case and all goes well, I’ll probably turn into a self-absorbed, self-involved, narcissistic prick with a marble statue. I’m sorry. Please don’t pee on my statue.
For example, everyone loves bears. Polar bears, panda bears, black bears, you name it. Bears have become so cuddly and lovable that if I were ever to encounter a bear, I’d half expect it to come bearing Coca-Cola and a good forest fire story. Same thing with penguins. While I generally hate all other birds, I love penguins: mainly because they’re fat and furry and they’re featured in almost every single animated movie out there (we even saw penguins in Madagascar… really?).
Honestly, our love for blimp-like animals doesn’t make sense. I could sit at the zoo for hours, watching hungry, hungry hippos chew on grass. Yet, if I were to see some obese human being sitting with a pile of ribs, I’d probably have a gag reflex. If I were to meet a furry, plump, waddling man, I would not wish to see him on the movie screen. And if a group of dancing, naked, fat guys tried to sell me Charmin toilet paper, I would almost prefer just to air dry. (Almost.)
Our human superficiality is counter-intuitive, especially when seen from a Darwinian lens. Why would we, as human beings, favor small people and big animals? It’s clearly easier for a giant bear to eat you when you’re a tiny person, versus when you’re the size of a tugboat.
It was a great problem to have, yet I agonized over the decision: to follow the typical corporate path (finance > some cushy job > a life of picket fences and clam bakes) or to pursue some ridiculous, crazy, unclear, undetermined, unknown dream. I wanted to have it all, but I was quickly realizing that I had to choose.
