cross your teas and dot your eyes

two thoughts:

• just because you write, doesn't make you a 'writer'. waxing nostalgic over pretty pictures someone else took does not give you license to empathize with hemingway when he said 'writing was easy, all you do is sit down and bleed' or however that quote goes. especially if your grammar is awful.
• you can't be a writer if you don't write. duh.

they may seem, at first glance, to contradict each other, but look again and voila! it makes so much sense. people ask me, usually after i've asked them (because real people don't actually ask questions like this i guess?), what is your dream job/what would you do if you could do what you loved or some variation thereof. and if i know them well enough to know they won't laugh at me, i might tell them that i want to be a Writer. capital w. i want to write books, many books, all kinds of books, and i want to do it well enough that a)i don't criticize myself to death, and b) that i can stop being an underpaid gofer boy and make my living that way.

now, here's the thing: i don't write. like, ever. i write really funny text messages sometimes, and occasionally blisteringly witty (and eternally humble, obvz) facebook status updates, but, as many a deluded tumblr-er has found before, these things will never elevate me to hemingway status. i'm not the biggest hemingway fan in the world, as an aside, he's just a well-known and respected name. i mean, he was a cool dude, i just haven't read many of his books is all.

what was i saying? oh yeah... i should write more. because even if i never get paid to do it and no one hangs a poster of my somber headshot above their bed, i can at least say, in truth, that i am a writer. because i write. just like all those pretentious tumblrers that i hate so much. goddamn it.

lesson of the day: there is just no winning in this life.