Career Mapping for the Fictionally Inclined

There are a lot of careers out there. There are some I’m suited for, and way more that I am most definitely not.

But I’ll never know unless I scope them out, right? Today, I’m looking at some of the careers I’ve been very interested in as of late.

Scarer at Monsters Inc.

Upside: I can be scary. And the weird part of my head quite likes the idea of sneaking around and screaming at people while they’re asleep.

Downside: The normal part of my head is very ashamed that the weird part just wrote that down. Also, I would apologize profusely to the kids I scare. And if an adorable little girl followed me out of her room, I would probably play with her and be promptly fired.

Editor of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Upside: Adventure. Interesting people (and other… beings). Universal travel. The chance to help countless generations after me to do the same (for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day).

Downside: High possibility of getting stranded on mostly harmless (but boring) planets. One of the more dangerous and unpredictable careers I could choose. It’s very improbable that a human could land it anyway. But hey, more improbable things have happened, yeah?

Captain of the Enterprise.

Upside: Travel, adventure, and discovery. Witty banter dished out liberally on a daily basis. Flirting in the workplace is practically encouraged.  Loose code of conduct allows me to mess up, get fired, and get re-hired immediately if I endear myself to commanders beforehand.

Downside: There are definite reasons as to why no man has ever boldly gone where I’m going. And I will probably find out the hard way.

Avenger.

Upside: My job is saving the world. What better job description can you get? Also, my co-workers are entertaining, interesting, and occasionally mythical. Very few careers promise that. Also? SHAWARMA.

Downside: Paparazzi. Being constantly starstruck by co-workers. Possibility of dying with each workday, and the pressure of being a “superhero.” PTSD and anxiety attacks have been common in this line of work.

Consulting detective.

Upside: The ultra-intelligence needed to allow me to fit in to this career allows me to figure everyone out, all day every day. I can tell what’s on people’s minds, and I can work that to my advantage. Also: being arrogant is in my job description, and I am my own boss. The police let me know when they need me, and I let them know when they can have me.

Downside: That ultra-intelligence I mentioned would take a very long time to gather, and while I’m not bashing my own intellect, let’s just say I cannot tell a computer programmer by his tie. Another con would be that serial killers are always trying to murder me. As diverting as I’m sure it is, it is rather inconvenient for my long-term plan (living). And I would have no friends. Well, maybe one.

I can tell that this is going to take me a little time. After all, choosing a career is nothing to take lightly. I’m sure I missed a couple fiction-based occupations, so be sure to let me know if any of you have something in mind!

Have a day full of literal and metaphorical sunshine, and I wish you all the best of luck with your endeavors, fictional and otherwise.

 

 

 

 

Control

I’ve read (and seen, regrettably) enough Green Lantern to be fairly certain that the force of will power is strong. However, when facing down a tray of cupcakes after you’ve already had three, will power seems like the most foreign concept since first learning that vampire/human romance is a thing.

Will power and self-control get no attention. The motto of the 21^st century as I’ve seen it is “Do what feels good (See also: YOLO),” and while following that advice will lead to good feelings for a period of time, chances are that in the not-so-distant future, you will feel significantly less good about consuming that fourth cupcake.

{I know this.}

For example, I’m trying to learn French right now, but unfortunately, this process requires a little bit more than just the mental capacity to remember that certain words are meant to be feminine and others masculine (Come on, France. They’re just words; there’s no need to assign them genders.). It takes me making the conscious decision to spend a few minutes on French instead of doing any number of the things that I’d rather be doing.

Which is far harder for me than it should be.

So, to be honest? This post is for me, because I need some help with this: not just with French, but with everything else that requires commitment. You can come along too, if you like.

Dear Emory,

Self-control is a God-given fruit of the spirit. that should be good enough for you. Everyone knows that a virtue doesn’t get to that status unless it’s pretty darn wonderful. When you see someone exhibiting self-control, you admire them. They do great things.

Without self-control, self-discipline, and the green force of will power, Madeleine L’engle may have given up after twenty-six publishing attempts, and I would have never read Wrinkle in Time. Walt Disney would not have created his iconic characters, stories, and movies, nor set the stage for the happiest place on earth. The Doctor would not have gone back for Wilfred. Jimmy Coates would be an eleven-year-old murderer. Jason Bourne would be the government’s puppet. Also dead. Phineas and Ferb would spend all day sitting under a tree, Tiana would never have gotten her restaurant, and Darth Vader would still be serving the Chancellor.

“Yeah, um, only two of those people are real.”

Shut up, Brain. What I’m getting at is that the virtues are real.

Self-control: n. The act of denying yourself, controlling your impulses.

No matter how much society tells you to do “what feels good,” you have to remember that your feelings do not make good decisions. If you don’t have self-control, then what are you letting control you?

Since my customary farewell would appear oddly self-serving, I shall simply say,

Good luck,

Emory

Knockaround Update

I have a lot of unrelated things to say today that I can’t organize into a normal posty-post.

So let’s get this show on the road!

        Uno: I have been nominated for the Versatile Blogger award by Gemma (author of Remain Insane) and nominated for the Sunshine award by Kayla (author of The Thousand Lives)!

Thank you, my dears! And the rest of you – check those girls out. They are winners and their blogs are fabulous.

Now to re-assign the awards! I’m not sure how many awards I can give to one blogger at a time, so I’ll just give one to each for now.

I pass on the Versatile Blogger award to the Voyager for her blog The Ultimate Voyage. This clever young lady has run an exceedingly magnificent blog for over a year now, and you really ought to treat yourself to her nerdy, thoughtful, theological goodness. My favorite of her posts is Cumulus Boni Et Mali.

Also, I would like to throw a VB award to Kayla of The Thousand Lives! If you have a fully functioning memory span, you’ll remember her from four paragraphs ago. She mainly writes about writing (very well, too), and my favorite post of hers is Write to Learn. 

I present the Sunshine award to Kirelion for her blog For the Win. She is a fairly new blogger, but her posts are still full of incessant loveliness and fangirling, especially my favorite of hers, The Great McGregor. I know this girl in the real world, and I can say confidently that you would love her.

Also a Sunshine award to Rika, the Awkward Geeky Girl. That blog name tells you everything you need to know! My favorite post of hers is The Shy Girl at a Party.

And now, according to the rules of accepting these awards, I have to answer the following questions about myself.

Favorite color: TARDIS blue. Otherwise known to normal people as royal blue.

Favorite animal: Turtle.

Favorite number: 30367.

Favorite non-alcoholic drink: Guava juice. I only ever drank it in Hawaii, but the day I forget the taste of that heavenly elixir is the day people stop using the phrase “when pigs fly.”

Favorite alcoholic drink: I’ll let you know when I find out.

Facebook or Twitter: Facebook has endowed me with the unwanted and despised knowledge that most people don’t know the finer points of grammar or spelling, but Twitter is a such a communicational downgrade (140 characters? For reals?) that I would have to say Facebook.

My passions: Stories and storytelling. You should not be surprised by this.

Giving or receiving gifts: Bit of a toss-up (who doesn’t like receiving gifts?), but if I must pick one, it would probably be giving. I’m a fan of bribing people for affection.

Favorite city: Bend, Oregon. Because, to quote Allie Brosh, the author of Hyperbole and a Half,

” … it is quite possibly the best place on earth and just breathing the air here is like huffing joy and celebration.”

Favorite TV shows: Come on guys, you know this. Doctor Who, Sherlock, Psych, White Collar, Phineas and Ferb (don’t judge), and Gravity Falls (please don’t judge).

Let’s move along now.

       Two: Remember when it was announced that Matt Smith had signed on to do season eight of Doctor Who? Well, due to the fact that we live in a fallen, broken world, this is no longer applicable. My Doctor is regenerating this Christmas.

No, no, no, just kidding. My actual reaction is

…

And I need a hug.

       Trois: I recently returned from a three-day trip to my state capitol with six high-school strangers who were, though wonderful people, not geeky at all. It was hard. I saw angel figurines and I blinked. I saw cracks in the wall and I didn’t point out our likely demise. I discussed investigation techniques and didn’t quote Sherlock. I hiked through a forest and didn’t reference Lost. My driver had a stetson and I whispered, “Stetsons are cool.”

No one heard me.

       And forty-three: Two kids were picked from that predominantly non-nerdy group to go to Washington DC, and I was blessed to be one of them! Something good came out of my pain after all. Lord willing, at the end of this month, I, along with the other winner, will be in the nation’s capitol, giving speeches in front of representatives, touring museums, debating with strangers, and continuing to choke back my well-placed fandom references.

Should be interesting.

That’s all for now, folks. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program soon.

Don’t forget to be awesome!

A Very Whovian Post

I have quite the Saturday planned.

My schedule for Saturday

• wake up with a strange sense of foreboding
• proceed with daily rituals anxiously
• avoid internet for fear of spoilers
• give in and use the internet in small doses
• see a spoiler and get angry at myself
• see The Name of the Doctor
• mourn
• see Star Trek: Into Darkness
• lose the ability to form a cohesive sentence

For those of you who are unaware, the Doctor Who season finale, entitled The Name of the Doctor, is this Saturday. If you’ve had any contact whatsoever with people who enjoy Doctor Who (that includes reading this far into this post), you probably have an inkling that, for us, a season ending feels quite a bit like [insert supremely terrifying, if melodramatic, metaphor here]. If you see a Whovian today, comfort them to the best of your ability. Prepare to give out a lot of hugs, for there are a lot of us.

A lot.

Isn’t the power of story-telling beautiful? The way a writer can access your emotions and touch the real parts of your life? It’s easy to simplify a story by saying it’s just a story. Just a made-up tale about made-up people going on made-up adventures. But everyone who’s ever enjoyed a story knows that you cannot water down the definition that far without sacrificing the important fact that stories matter. You can reach people from all walks of life with a story. And those people from all those different walks, they will be able to bond over that story, when they might not have otherwise.

Because of stories, hundreds of thousands of people can love the same thing and be driven to each other as a result of that love. And Doctor Who in particular, well, we all know its influence through space and time is a broad one, nearly fifty years in the making.

So good on you, makers of Doctor Who.

I dread look forward to the season finale.

It is said that in this coming episode we will not only find out who Clara Oswald really is, but also what the Doctor’s name is. Obviously, this has led to some very entertaining speculations. Can’t think of any yourself? Here are my favorites from tumblr.

The Doctor’s Name

• The 
• John Smith
• Sweetie
• Slim Shady
• Valentinez Alkalinella Xifax Sicidabohertz Gombigobilla Blue Stradivari Talentrent Pierre Andri Charton-Haymoss Ivanovici Baldeus George Doitzel Kaiser III
• Kenneth

I’m banking on number 3, myself.

That’s all for now, folks.

Go hug a Whovian.

Conscious

I’m a nerd.

But more specifically, I am a fangirl.

This means I spend a lot of my time doing this.

I’m not ashamed about the things I like; on the contrary, everyone who claims to know me knows full well that I truly love what I love. I have a TARDIS t-shirt and a Sherlock necklace that I wear with pride, Totoro pins on my purse, copious amounts of books and comic books on my bookshelves, crushes on men that don’t exist (Darcy, WHY?), and I quote my favorite books and TV shows on a daily basis.

I’m an open book.

But I’ve come to the realization that my particular brand of enthusiasm is not always socially acceptable. People will look at you strangely if you scribble “Bad Wolf” on every available writing surface, and if you start squealing in a movie theater when a Star Trek Into Darkness trailer comes on, people will most likely want to rip out your vocal cords.

So in an effort to avoid public mauling, I’ve tried to tone it down. There are people around whom I don’t mention my fandoms, pretend not to be enthusiastic about my existence, and don’t quote Lizzie Bennet Diaries. But I can’t say I enjoy it too much. When they’re gone, I find myself bursting with unused fangirl energy and/or fervor, and just sort of shut down.

Because I’m human, and because I don’t want people to judge me, I try to be a bit more normal. I mean, for the record, I suck at it, but I still try.

But you know what I’m finding out? In the words of the great philosopher John Green,

“… nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.”

I’m excited that I’m conscious enough to spew nonsense.

Take that, normalcy.