Perks: Writing

Nothing makes me happier than writing. I've always loved it and therefore the entire thing is a perk for me. Some people can dance and paint but I can write. I can put my thoughts on paper (or online) and convey who I am by making people laugh and maybe even pissing people off, both things I like doing.

The only negative part of writing for me is that no one will hire me. That's not true, I'm sure someone will, but being so young I don't want to settle. I've watched my friends settle on their jobs and boyfriends and I refuse to be unhappy like they are.

Though I'm not formally being paid to write, I have held a lot of writing positions in my life. I was first published when I was 11 but was given praise for my writing since I was 7. Each venture into writing has created an experience for me like no other and therefore I've been given some great perks.

Young Writer (Ages 7-13)

The best perk about being so young and being a good a writer is that you get to hear that on a constant basis. Nothing feels better than people loving me as much as I love me or people being as proud of me as I am of myself.

It's given me a lot of bragging rights when I get to say that I was published at such a young age or I received the highest writing score in what have you. But the best part about it was that it gave me a confidence that I wasn't getting anywhere else. It gave me confidence so early on that all I wanted to do was hone my skills and craft, I love it.

Angsty Writer Ages (14-18)

I was in high school and all I did was mope around and be depressed. So I wrote things down but never in diary form. I was able to convey how unhappy I was but do it where I wasn't whining. Even my darkest writing and most "sensitive" pieces were all well written stuff. Even when it wasn't a song or poem or short story I was writing, I still was able to convey my exact feelings about somethings with enough of a biting attitude but yet still being intelligent about it.

When I was in high school I wrote for the yearbook. It was one of those courses that I took because I had nothing else to take. I ended up loving that class. Outside of being surrounded by some really great people, who were just as mean and hilarious as I was, I got to take a nugget of shit and turn it into gold. That nugget of shit was high school. My high school wasn't great in any sense. For every very smart student there were 5 kids who should be forced by law to wear a helmet every day. The sports teams that anyone ever gave a shit about were absolutely awful (although I heard Badminton had big shit going on.) To top it all off the teaching staff was...what it was. There were some GREAT teachers and then there were the others. The others also included any administrative staff (Principals, Secretaries, etc.) they were terrible.

The biggest challenge during my entire writing "career" was trying to make our high school even sound interesting. Charles Barkley likes to use the metaphor of "You can have the prettiest girl in the world but it doesn't really make a difference if she's pretty when she's dumb." I had to try to hide the fact that even though our high school was pretty, it was dumb as rocks. I did this through my writing.

The other perk of working on the yearbook was getting to pick and choose who was going to be in the yearbook. That was a perk for all of us. Obviously every student gets one picture in the yearbook but we got to choose whether or not that would be their only time to shine.

There was a group of underclassmen girls who were, for lack of a better term, huge sluts. They skanked it up so much it brought the entire reputation of the school down, which I didn't even think was a possibility. A friend of mine, Star Jones, was actually friends with the whores and took a picture of them eating lunch. His entire spread featured students during lunchtime with the captions "This student enjoying...," or "Students eating..." Star Jones took the one picture of the Bang Bang Club and listed their first and last names and what they were doing. A few of my fellow yearbook staffers saw that, we were disgusted, and we changed it. We deleted all of their names and replaced it with "A group of whores..." then we changed the word whores to students. I personally thinks 'whores' was a much better fit but you can't always get what you want.

Obviously power was a big perk in being on the yearbook staff. We all had power to basically do whatever we wanted to do. This power was handed to us, literally. We were given cards for the entire year that said we could leave campus on "official yearbook duties" which really only meant LONG OFF CAMPUS LUNCHES! If we had nothing to do we wandered around school and for those of us with cars, we left to get the good food out of town. The passes also gave us permission to be in places that we weren't supposed to be.

There was a "hot teacher" that was giving all of the boys a chubby on a daily basis. I had never seen her.

Zeus: You've never seen my wife? How?
Working Girl: I don't have her this year. I don't even know where her classroom is.

Zeus, who was not in yearbook class but yet had perfect attendance, got a camera and told me we were going upstairs to take pictures of her class. We did exactly that, I wanted to see why she was such hot stuff so we made up a story about us needing to take pictures of students in the classroom and her classroom was chosen. I stood there with a camera taking pictures of the students just so that I could see what all the fuss was about. Not only was I not really taking pictures, the camera wasn't even on.

Freedom, Power and getting people to believe your bullshit. It's basically what America runs on.

Adult Writer (Ages 18-Now)

Being an adult is hard. Being a writer is hard. Being a college graduate with a journalism degree who wants nothing more than to write but her work experience is hindering her is even harder. I loved writing in college. I enjoyed contributing to the newspaper and I liked writing about subjects that were more controversial. The only thing I have to do now is put the degree to good use. I love writing on my blog and I love when I get feedback from people. I greatly appreciate it, be it negative or positive, and I love responding back (especially the people who say something negative so I can put them in their place...D-Bags.) I can now look back and say that I am satisfied with my writing history and what I've learned from it. That is the biggest perk of them all, being happy and satisfied with who I am and what I do. Now I just need some publication to give me another perk (normally in the form of a check.)