I'm a Pro

I am an expert at many things. Unfortunately, the world as a whole doesn't tend to deem these things--these arts, if you will--as conventional and least of all worthy of any sort of income. Of course, I blame the world for being far too narrow-minded, and I truly hope that someday it will become more open to the finer things in life, such as:

1. Coffee drinking. I could drink enough coffee to turn the ocean from a deep blue into a syrupy, coffee brown. And I probably do. I'm quite good at consuming coffee and I'm even better at making the distinction between "good coffee" and "bad coffee," "light coffee" (usually bad) and "dark coffee" (almost always delicious, assuming it isn't dark because it's been sitting on the burner for an ungodly amount of time and scorched beyond drinkability). My taste for coffee is honed right down to the very region of the world where the coffee is grown. I can taste the difference, and believe me, I have a preference (Latin American grown, in case you're wondering). Of course, I do my best to support fair trade coffee, even though I spend an obscene amount of time (and, sadly, money) at Starbucks. Side note: I'll quit giving that particular capitalist establishment my business as soon as I leave this country (hey, Rome wasn't built in a day).

2. Globe trotting. If the job to travel with no strings attached (read: no other work involved) existed, I would be the best in the business. Granted, I've only been to a handful of countries and I'm not exactly the best traveler in terms of roughing it (I nearly faint every time I see a cockroach), but I love traveling more than I love my iPod or my cat (another story within and of itself), and that's saying something. Traveling to new and unseen places, eating new and delicious (and sometimes disgusting beyond description) cuisine, and meeting people from all over the globe are what I consider to be my niche in life. If only I could get paid to travel instead of paying through the rear to do it. I've come to terms with the fact that I will probably never retire because (a) I won't have anything to retire from and (b) I will never have the money to do so, thanks to my traveling addiction. But, hey, you only live once. Oh, and while I'm on the topic of traveling, I would like to announce my upcoming travel plans: I'm going to Japan for a little over a week in July to visit Osaka, Kyoto, maybe Tokyo, and to climb Mount Fuji. Seriously. I'm going to climb it.

3. Wasting time. If this were an art, I would be Leonardo Da Vinci. I'm the queen of wasting time. Doing what? you may wonder. I don't know. "Wasting time" usually means not doing anything noteworthy or memorable.

4. Reading. (See previous post.)

5. Thinking about life and/or the meaning of it. This might fall into the category of "wasting time", but I sometimes feel like I've figured it out and, consequently, feel productive. However, I'm a little bipolar in that I swing back and forth between enlightenment and total cluelessness, the latter of the two being most prominent. I find myself frequently asking "Why am I on this chaotic Earth?" or "What the @#%# am I doing with my life?" These are the questions most people ask at some point in time, but I seem to obsess over them. I fill pages upon pages in my diary asking these questions in different variations (e.g. "Should I join the Peace Corps next year? If so, what's the point? No, I think I should go to Spain to learn Spanish and to find a rich European man. Wait, scratch that. Graduate school in Australia. But maybe...." so on and so forth). Needless to say, I don't have life figured out and I probably never will (the only real conclusion I've come to).

If I could acquire some form of income for any or all of the above, I would be a billionaire. But thanks to the world we live in, only brainy people like Bill Gates are recognized for their supposed "talents". But as they say in French, "C'est la vie". And now I will stop wasting your time while I'm wasting mine. People.com is calling, and so I'm going to move on and continue my #3 art without imposing it on the rest of the world.