May 2004

I Forgot How to Do It
We Are Five

Wow. Writing is hard. I mean, way harder than I remember it being.

See, I've been away from writing for a while, and I thought I could just sit write down and jump write back into it. And, the funny thing is, I wasn't all that good to begin with. I mean, I had my moments, but I tried to start up again for the Evil Robots Birthday Party, and I realized that I totally forgot how to do it.

It used to be my job. I was a copywriter for a small ad agency in Richmond, VA. It's a great job, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a great experience. Then I got moved to data analysis. Data analysis for an ad agency where no one in the office has any idea what you're talking about is…not as enjoyable as copywriter. Ad work in general is peculiar work. Everyone is under immense pressure, deadlines move up (never back), and in the end of the day, if you've done everything right, people may have been better off without it. I think that's why so many ad people drink. Think about it: doctors have all kinds of pressures, but at the end of that day, you delivered a baby, or set a broken leg, or did some kind of good. With advertising, you might have actually caused humanity to take a step backwards. Or, at least to stumble a bit.

Anyway, about this time Godzilla and Grandpa started up Evil Robots Inc. and let me write for them. Good times. See, since I was writing everyday (and not just for work…I was an email champ), I had all this excess writing that needed to get dumped out somewhere. Also, it was a chance to say things I could never get away with for a client.

There was only so long that I could stay in an office environment. As the percentage of time I spent at work looking for other jobs creeped past fifty, I started to think about what the hell I was doing in advertising. I didn't have a good answer, so I took the next logical step - I quit my job, cashed in my 401(k) and went to graduate school in physics.

The first major hurdle I faced was my total lack of physics classwork. Apparently, and, don't you find this out the hard way, they want you to have taken some physics and math classes before they let you into graduate school. So, I went to school to catch up. I supported myself with 2 part-time jobs and made up the classes I would have taken if I had been a physics major in college (not my college…we didn't do math there).

Two years later, I entered graduate school as a real live graduate student. I kind of went into this as a joke; I told my friends that I had figured out this awesome scam to stay in school forever. But, really it has been even more fantastic than I imagined. Secretly, of course, this is really hard work…harder, even, than if I had done the work I was supposed to do as an undergraduate. The difference is that it's work I like.

And, that is an amazing difference. I don't hate myself anymore, and as a result, the writing has suffered. Sure, some could attribute my inability to write to my lack of practice (in fact, I tried to do that earlier - but don't try to look for consistency, I'm a crappy writer).

I don't even know how to end an article anymore.