Rite of Passage

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the holiday which bears his name, I played some poker today. It's the least I could do with my day off.

I've never considered myself to be a writer. Sure, there's that Bachelor's Degree in English, but I focused primarily on literary criticism. I took several creative writing courses, but only wrote enough to complete the assignments. I actually had a short essay published in the university's literary magazine as a freshman, called "Why Are Women Cold?" I'll have dig that one up and post it. It makes me cringe, as I notice some of the more clumsy elements, but I still like it, and I'm proud of it. Not many people ever find themselves published, even in a small University magazine.

I wrote a paper on Rene Descartes for a philosophy class I took at community college as I re-took most of my freshman year (turns out you actually need to go to class once in a while. Who knew?). The instructor asked if he could submit it to the literary magazine there, and I'm told that it was actually published. One of these days, I should look it up and see.

So what happened? I just never thought I had anything to say. I enjoy writing, and believe I do a competent job of it, but the motivation has never been there. So, rather than go to work at a Kwik-E-Mart or whatever English majors end up doing, I continued working at the PC company where I built computers during college, and eventually worked my way up into one of those fancy IT jobs, just before the tech bubble burst and the music stopped. I feel for everyone that was left without a chair, but I'm grateful for how things worked out for me.

So now, thanks to this blog, I'm back to writing, and today I feel like a Real Writer. For each and every day leading up to my Vegas trip, I was writing a different story about a previous trip. Yesterday, there was no story. I missed a deadline! That's what makes a real writer, dagnabit.

Rather than revel in my writerhood, though, I am compelled to get back to work. I noticed that I am now linked by some of my favorite blogs, and I have an obligation to prove I can type several words per day, organized into neat sentences and paragraphs. It is the ability to blog that separates us from the animals. Except for all those people that blog pictures of their dogs and cats...you can never really tell who is in charge there. Some of those animals look pretty sophisticated.

Thanks to AlCantHang, JoeSpeaker and MrSubliminal for throwing my link into your blogrolls. Even when you primarily write for yourself, it's nice to know that people are reading.