I’m trying to get my apartment cleaned/tidied in preparation for a move, and in that cleaning, tidying and preparation I came across several fortune cookie fortunes that for some reason I’ve never thrown away.  Maybe I’m saving them to help my friend Jeremy with his book of fortune cookie fortunes.  Maybe I saved them in hopes that some of them are or will become true.  Anyway, I’ve decided to finally throw out the strips of paper, but for everyone’s benefit, I’m sharing the contents with you all before I do.  My fortunes are now also yours.

• Change your thoughts and you change your destiny.

• A liar is not believed even though he tells the truth.
• You will meet an important person who will help you advance professionally.
• Look around; happiness is trying to catch you.
• You have an unusually magnetic personality.
• It is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today.
• You are a person of culture.
• Read in order to live.
• Ignorance never settles a question.
• You have a chance to help someone out right now in a big way.
• The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.
• Generosity and perfection are your everlasting goals.
• Ignorance is not fault.
• You are the center of every group’s attention.
• He who enjoys doing and enjoys what he has done is happy.
• You are going to have a very comfortable old age.
• You will be fortunate in the opportunities presented to you.
• Don’t forget to do good deeds as you accumulate wealth.
• Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.
• When the moment comes, take the last one from the left.

Six weeks before the planes hit, I stood atop the North Tower. I remember the amazing view of the city, and eerily, I remember seeing a plane fly over the harbor below. I remember thinking, “Wow, I’m looking down on a plane.” A month and a half later, both towers would lay in ruins.

That September, as a college senior, I was in a Children’s Literature class when the first tower was hit. It wasn’t until I reached my car and started the ignition that I heard on the radio what had happened. I remember rushing home to see the second tower fall. The rest of the day is a blur, but I remember spending it with various friends, eating lunch at Cici’s (who had ESPN on and couldn’t figure out how to change the channel — as they were scrambling for the manual, ESPN switched from their coverage to ABC News), going to my next class, which functioned as a prayer meeting, and attending the emergency Convocation that was called after classes had been canceled.

Planes used to fly over my apartment building all the time, so it was especially eerie that night as I looked up at an empty sky and reflected on how quickly things had changed. Like most people, I would be glued to the TV for the next several weeks. On September 12, local businesses would start installing televisions because nobody wanted to hear background music anymore. They wanted to watch the towers fall again and again and again while they ate. They wanted to see President Bush with a bullhorn in downtown Manhattan while they ran errands.

Every year when I look back at the events of September 11, I remember standing outside my apartment at the end of the day, reflecting on what I had seen and heard, knowing that this was the beginning of a new era, realizing that war was right around the corner, wondering how everything would unfold. And in that moment, suspended between the chaos of that day and the uncertainty of what might happen tomorrow, for just that moment, I felt peace.

I work in customer service, and if you ever have a desire to see the ugly side of humanity, I highly recommend a job in this field. I don’t get to witness mass genocide or death by starvation, but I have regular contact with people who think that retail injustice, or their perception of such injustice, especially when they are the alleged victim, is just as infuriating, if not more so.

I’ve been with the same company for roughly two-and-a-half years, and although I found my current position enjoyable at first, the job and the industry have served to highlight just how skewed our priorities are. Our price adjustment policy “victimizes” the customer. Our shipping charges are “a crime against humanity.”

This is our Darfur.

I am uneasy about having to feed the ideal of American Consumerism in order to feed myself. My job requires me to embrace the idea that the customer is Number One, that it is all about them and their little world. A world where tragedy is paying too much for a sweater and outrage doesn’t begin to describe the reaction to a sold-out pair of shoes.

This is our Blood Diamond.

I’m tired of helping people who don’t have actual needs. Spoiled rich kids mourning over a jacket as if they’ve lost a child to AIDS.

I’m sick of it, and I want out. I’m still young (by most standards anyway), single, and I’ve got nothing keeping me here. Except debt.

Ah yes, debt. The thing we love to celebrate with the ringing of bells and raucous cheers and applause.

That’s not a metaphor. We actually do this where I work.

God willing, I will have paid off my credit card by January, leaving myself with only student loans, which I will carry with me for many years. Thankfully, I have options for forbearance and deferment, which means I could be temporarily without any debt-related bills as early as next winter. Once that is ironed out, I will (hopefully) make my great escape. But to where?

I want to do something real. Something that matters. I want to get out of my own little world and start serving people with actual needs. I want to wake up in the morning knowing that I have the chance to make an actual difference, however small. Not through some side project or weekend trip, but all the time.

Although the prospect scares me a lot, I’ve been looking at the Peace Corps website recently and considering it. I don’t think I would deal well with not bathing and having to eat mushy/liquidy food. Then there are other creature comforts like running water and air conditioning that would be difficult to live without. But maybe something like this is what I need. Maybe I just need to try a short-term mission trip and see how that goes. I feel like I need to see the world to truly grasp the big picture. Not the world I see on TV, but the world as it truly is. I want to go away and experience culture shock, then come back and experience it again in America.

Most of us don’t realize just how shocking our culture is.

Japan might have us beat, though.

Between life in general and the continuing influx of story ideas, I don’t know how I’m ever going to get this book done. I’m excited about my latest idea, which deals with dreams and how real they can seem sometimes. Maybe I’ll turn that into a short story so it won’t interfere with the long story I’ve already started on.

One of the things I touch on in the first few chapters of my novel is how people get so wrapped up in things that are supposed to improve their life, and avoid life entirely in the process. For those of us who aren’t working our dream job (read: me), life can seem brutal at times. The secret is to find the things that keep us from living the life we were made to live and figure out how to take those things out of the equation.

By the time we discover there’s a problem, some of us will realize that we have a long and difficult battle ahead. Some will give up, but the strong ones will press on.  Although my obstacles are relatively few, sometimes the battle seems almost insurmountable. This is due mostly to impatience. I want it to be over and done with now. A time machine would be nice, so I could skip to the good part. Or if there was a way to live the CliffsNotes version of my life for the next year or so, that would make things easier.

Looking back on the hard parts I’ve been through, though, I see their benefit. They are my point of reference when things get difficult. When life becomes stressful or laborious, I can usually remember a time when it was worse and thank God that it isn’t that bad. In the worst of times, the good times remind me that things can and will improve.

This is how life works. Without the good times, bad times would be unbearable. Without the bad times, good times would just be times.

I just started listening to Christmas music tonight for the first time this year. In years past I would have been playing this sort of stuff for a month or so already, but not anymore. As time passes I’m becoming sort of a cross between Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey. I miss what Christmas used to be and in many ways I hate what it has become.

Maybe it’s because I work in the retail industry. Every day I stand on the front lines of everything that is wrong with Christmas. The rampant consumerism and materialist values of our culture. The ridiculous war waged by those who boycott every retailer that uses the word “Holiday” instead of “Christmas.” Two thousand years later and we’re still waiting for peace on earth. You’d think we could get it right at least once a year.

Maybe as kids we are protected from all the vitriol and selfishness that makes itself painfully clear this time of year. Maybe we don’t realize at the time that Santa Claus is being used by the Man to perpetuate the retail agenda.

Despite my feelings about the holiday season, a trace of the Christmas I used to know still remains, if only for a few hours each year. I’ll always miss the people and things I used to associate with what Christmas once was, but I have to cling to the pieces of what it still is and hope that the parts that have been lost along the way will return in the years ahead and awaken the spirit of Christmas that has seemed farther with the passage of each year.

But maybe I’m hoping for too much.

I’m currently on the road with my old pal Ari Hest; I was able to take off work for a few days to help him out on tour for a few nights. Yesterday was a day off, and I spent the vast majority of it in a hotel room in Durham, North Carolina.

I had hoped to make some progress on the novel, and I wrote a few paragraphs, most of which will probably be cut later on. Still, I consider it progress. I just wish it would happen faster.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Charlotte right now, killing time before we have to set up for tonight’s show. It’s hard to think between the cappuccino machine, the Spin Doctors song in the foreground, the whistling customer and the other one talking on his cell phone. I apologize if this post makes no sense. I blame these things.

I got an idea for my next novel recently, and just the other day I combined it with another idea I had for a short story. I think it has promise, and I’m really excited about getting into it, but I think it should wait until my current project is finished. I wish I could tell you all about it, but that would simultaneously ruin the surprise and open my work up to theft, two things I’m trying to be careful about.

This whistling guy needs to have his lips removed. And his arms, too. He’s tapping on the table while he whistles.

Writing a book is hard work. Especially when you have a full-time job. Especially when that full-time job is second shift.

I’m trying to work my way through Chapter Four little by little. The few people who have read the first three chapters want to see more, and my lack of progress over the past year or so has probably got some of them wondering if I’ll ever finish this thing.

Someone recently gave me this advice: a page a day is a book a year. This is true, but I’d rather write a book in two or three years naturally than force myself to write one in a year. Although a page a day sounds like a reasonable and attainable goal, writing isn’t as simple as sitting down and typing it out. Any decent writer knows that forced writing is crap writing.

I’ve been more inspired lately to get back to writing this novel, but the biggest obstacle now is time. Eight hours sleeping, eight hours at work and four hours in between each. Between running errands, showering, cooking, eating and entertainment, there isn’t much time to get anything done at all. I have a week of vacation coming up the first week of September and I’m holding out hope for some real progress.

I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve always been a writer. When I was a kid I kept irregular journals and concocted weird stories inspired by wild animals, monsters, video game characters and drunk hillbillies.

A couple of years ago, as I was washing dishes, I got the idea for my current work-in-progress. I need to finish the story and establish my copyright before I start giving specific plot details, but I’m hoping it will be something people will enjoy, connect with and take something from.