MISSION STATEMENT

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately. This particular piece of writing is an example, in that I was reading a Dave Eggers story hailed as “the last great short story of the 20th century,” or maybe “the first great one of the 21st,” or I don’t know. But I was so eager to write this that I would read a page, realize I hadn’t actually paid attention to a word, and then have to reread it. This happens to me frequently. I’ve usually read a book twice by the time I reach the last page.

But so this, this little piece of my mind, of my word-thoughts, this is my Mission Statement. My wild and strange only in that it’s too ambitious and specific to ever come true, except that it will come true, and it’s all of my totally open and totally honest intentions for the next few years of my life.

Starting with this semester.

This semester, I’m going to meet, enchant, date, and fall in love with a wildly attractive and hilariously funny brunette actress – as I’m wont to do, although I usually skip the first three of the four steps – and she’s going to tell me one day between kisses that she can’t wait until we’ve both graduated and moved to New York together. This will settle the NY/LA debate currently raging within me (although it’s not raging too hard because, as you can see, I’ve made up my mind on New York with My Gorgeous Brunette Broadway Star).

I’ll graduate and find myself within New York within months. I’ll apply for film jobs the island over. I’ll try to find a job as an NBC page, or as a writer’s assistant on some show I wildly want to work on, like 30 Rock. I won’t get one of these jobs for years, and will instead work in a small coffee shop and write at nights, pulling in an extra buck or two (but literally only one or two dollars) by selling my writing.

My writing, however, will be poor. It will be young, naïve, and unlearned. It will be repetitive, as that sentence was. It will be pedantic. It will be hard to read. It will be, above all, embarrassing. Critics will take note, and I’ll start pushing harder for film jobs to compensate.

On weekends, me and MGBBS will go out to restaurants and clubs and art scenes and hang out with all of her Broadway friends. She will make everything shitty not.

And the day I have my interview with NBC, I’ll be in such a fantastic mood that they will welcome me into their page program on the spot, with wide and open arms. I’ll love it, I’ll get the SNL post, NBC will love me. But it’s a time-consuming job, 12 hours days and 6 days a week, and MGBBS will start to resent me. I’ll miss her first Broadway show, I’ll forget our three-year anniversary, I’ll start to become insensitive. And she will leave me.

I’ll be heartbroken. I’ll fall into a terrible and self-destructive cycle. I’ll cruise bars and start picking up random girls whose names I have no intention of learning, even while I’m making them eggs in the morning, and hunting old high school acquaintances whom I’d had wild and out-of-control yet severely repressed crushes on at one point. I’ll start spending nights at their places, texting MGBBS to let her know, and then I’ll handle myself so poorly that I will wreck those relationships, too.

I’ll finish up NBC’s page program a ruined man. I’ll turn down the job as Head Writer of SNL, no matter how hard they insist I take it, because I have to get my life in order. I’ll be bitter. I’ll be jaded. And I’ll be getting drunk dials from all my friends who are living the sweet life in LA.

So I’ll decide to move. I’ll pack everything up, take it down to Maryland, and buy a plane ticket. To Europe. I’ll go down to Old Ellicott City, to the Phoenix, and pick up some girl between high school and college, eager to experience the world, just 18, and invite her to come abroad with me. She’ll be mesmerized by my wit and charm. She’ll say yes in a heartbeat. She’ll have gigantic breasts.

By the end of the flight to Iceland, we’ll have realized that we are totally and completely incompatible, and that we’ve made a terrible mistake. But neither one of us will want to admit it, to ruin the fantasy. We’ll go to the Rift Valley and snorkel in the clearest water in the world, and then make our way to Spain. We’ll participate in La Tomatina, and when we throw our tomatoes at one another, it will be with true spite and malice, for we’ve run out of things to talk about by the second plane ride. We’ll go out to bars at night and drink ourselves silly, hook up with random foreign strangers in front of one another, and when I tell her I’m going to France she’ll tell me to go to Hell. She’ll fly back. I’ll continue onwards to the City of Love.

From there, I’ll head to the Middle East. I’ll pretend I’m Indiana Jones while I’m in Jordan, I’ll frolic in Dubai. I’ll go down south and visit Egypt, explore the pyramids, ride some camels. And then I’ll take flight to Kenya. I’ll take a hot air balloon over Masai Mara, let a giraffe eat food out of my own mouth. I’ll travel down to Tanzania. I’ll climb Kilimanjaro. It’ll change my life, my worldview. I’ll feel like a man. I’ll be invincible. I’ll roam all of Africa this way, until finally I decide it’s time to take my newfound esteem to India, Cambodia, Thailand. Then off to New Zealand, where I’ll black water raft under a glowworm starscape. I’ll go check out the Great Barrier Reef, fly from Sidney to Peru, live in the Amazon, go to Ecuador, see Galapagos, go hang out at Carnivale, come up through Mexico, cut straight through America, up into Canada, where I’ll go hang out with polar bears, ride dog sleighs, sleep in igloos.

And then I’ll go off to LA, and I’ll start to write. And all these experiences will pour into my writing, and it’ll sell like hotcakes, which to my knowledge haven’t been sold in decades, but metaphorically I believe are supposed to go very quickly to very high bidders. I’ll sell some screenplays. Meet up with my old film school friends. They’ll tell me MGBBS is in town. I’ll say fine. I’ll meet up with her. And she’ll see how I’ve changed, oh, how she’ll see, and she’ll say, “I want to get back together.”

I’m not sure what’ll happen after that. After all, I’m not a prophet. I can’t see into the future. But… I’ll make up my mind, then. And we’ll see.

As a testament to the writer in me, I'd just like to let you all know that I have revised my past entry three times already, and it's been up for only a few hours, for most of which I was very, very far from my computer. (About 5 feet. It was, however, turned off. Which is about as emotionally distant as I get from my computer.)

Note: I'm including this post-script as part of a revision of even this entry.

Hello! And welcome to the very first post of my Internet Word-Thought Repository. I'm Andrew. Andrew Adams, to be more exact, but I didn't want to open with my full name because I felt like it would make this entire thing much more formal, when, let's face it, that's not what my writing lends itself to. If my writing were a party of sorts, it wouldn't be a party so informal that you'd have to check your clothes at the door, or anything. It wouldn't be one of those parties with raucous amounts of drugs, strippers, KY-wrestling, unidentifiable alcoholic and/or roofie-tinged drinks. No, the IWTRs of that nature tend to be riddled with things like LOL and ROFLMAO and OMGzors! and I think she lieks me. This one won't be. In fact, it might not be a party at all. It might be more like a nice, casual afternoon of lounging out in your hammock on a spring day, maybe with some lemonade, maybe with a nice book. It'll be great. Really. I swear.

Now, if you'll excuse me, here is my abstract:

I'm intending this blog to keep me from falling out of touch with people. Which I have. Desperately. Mostly ever since I stopped blogging.

(TANGENT: I stopped blogging, mostly, because it was wrecking all my best stories. I was sick of meeting up with people, starting to tell them things, and then finding out that they'd already read about it. Also, it was frustrating to associate myself with the older, whinier, and more upset entries of my teenage years. Hence, a new blog, and not a revival of my old one.

I also like blogs because a) the writing cements events in my mind more, and make them more memorable and easier to talk about later and b) it encourages thought about other issues and topics more than isolation does.)

So this blog will be a hodgepodge of potpourri. It'll be a salmagundi of different thoughts. A melange of life events. A smattering of random writing, of poetry, essay, monologue, dialogue, and poorly conveyed thought processes. It'll be a a pastiche of other people's writing that I love. It'll be a conglomeration of other artistic endeavors. Like photography! It'll be a grab bag of overly ambitious intentions for the future, be it work or love or travel. And, perhaps most importantly, it'll be a gallimaufry of words meaning "mixture." Mayble it'll grow to even more! Who knows.

But, regardless, I'd like to invite you into it, and apologize for its disastrous and poorly-conceived reason for being, and for the fact that it's now infringing on your own life and eating away at your own time. I promise: I will never, ever force you to read it (So now that I've made that promise, feel free to stop reading).

AWKWARD NATION.

That's a name that I've embraced over the years, and I've always been vaguely aware that it probably makes it sound like I'm going to be delving into politics a lot more than I actually intend to. I never meant it as a comment on our nation. I am, admittedly, more interested in politics than I am impassioned by them.

But I started watching 'The West Wing' today, so maybe that'll change.

The name came about in my senior year of High School, when I was a co-founder of the Awkward Improv Something. We never quite settled on the third word. Some said it was Troupe, some said it was Group, I said it was Posse.

The definition of Posse in its formal usage denotes a group of armed men called upon by the sheriff to enforce the law. That's not how I meant it.

Unless, of course, you think we were armed with COMEDY.

And, yes, despite that last sentence encapsulating my idea of a joke, I do consider myself boldly, consistently, and arrogantly funny.

Do you see how awkward I just made this?

Hence: Awkward Nation.

Good gravy, this is spiraling out of control faster than I have any desire to admit. I didn't really come into this particular entry with a plan -- I once saw a sign that said "PLAN AHEA" and then ran out of space, and I laughed -- but I promise this won't be indicative of the standard Andrew Adams blog-entry.

Oh, lord, I used the term blog. I'd been avoiding that, but it kind of just came out before I could really hold back, and I'm not willing to go back to deleting it. I'm ashamed to have a blog. It's not a blog. It's an online journal. Ugh. It's not a journal, or a diary, either. It's a thought-page. It's a page for me to put down my word-thoughts. It's a page for me to embarrass myself with, more than anything else.

I don't know why I hate the word 'blog.' What I associate it with is Diablo Cody who, let's face it, isn't somebody I'd normally avoid being associated with. Not that I like being associated with pop-culture-entrenched screenwriting or anything, but, well, I mean, I guess, yeah. I do. I like being associated with PCES.

This is the worst introduction to a blog I could possibly imagine. I'm going down, I'm hitting 'Publish Post,' and I'm going to write another one, a new one, and it's going to tell people about me, and it's going to be great, and it's going to pretend like this post never existed.