Technical Writer

I am currently a technical writer. I did not train to be one; in fact, I didn't even take any srs bsns writing courses in college. I did try to take one once, though. It was a Creative Writing course, and I quickly realized I was in the wrong place because a writing sample was required to be accepted into the class:

I wrote a story about a gas station attendant with rage issues who discovers the porta-potty next to the station contains a horrible black hole monster of evil, and promptly begins gleefully directing people to it while they get horribly eaten.

One girl wrote a story about a middle-aged white woman. She gets divorced, then takes up pottery and starts selling her pottery at this art gallery her friend runs. Later, she looks at her ring finger and realizes her tan line has disappeared. The tan line is a metaphor for how she got over her husband and began Respecting Herself.

Another girl wrote about a girl who goes to the beach, and gets naked. Then she dances in the waves, and it is Erotic. The waves, they are freeing. Like sex.

Like sex.

Those two other girls read their samples aloud to the class.

The professor clapped like a seal.

I was placed on the waiting list.

Anyway, so I didn't really take any writing classes in college. I did take a number of programming courses, in which they didn't really teach you how to program. Especially the later courses. Man.

I am getting really off track. The point is, I am not trained as a writer, but somehow got hired as one based on my mysterious ability to write words. Words that say things! I do not know how I got this mysterious ability. It may have had to do with reading lots and lots of silly books about unicorns and mecha when I was little.

My interview was very terrifying (as are all interviews, to me), and involved puzzles. It seems to me singularly cruel to take a nervous applicant and then demand that they tell you how to get a gold bar across the river with two locks and two keys and a thieving ferryman, but I had been playing Professor Layton obsessively at the time (it is the only way to play Professor Layton), and so I came up with an answer and somehow blundered my way through some question about SQL. So there you go. I got here by playing video games and reading about mecha.

Now that I am hired, it is not my writing ability that is the biggest stressor of my job, but making sure that people tell me what I'm supposed to be writing about. Because developers are sneaky and they will keep things from you, or they'll change things without telling you, or they'll wait to design a feature until a week before all coding needs to stop. I also do not like the weekly meetings in which we discuss what we did, because I can never remember what I did, especially in front of seven or so people staring at me.

However, it is much better than my last job, which was as a software developer who had to work with Javascript and CSS. INTERNET BROWSERS ARE THE DEVIL, and also DEADLINES AND SMALL SOFTWARE COMPANIES. And also, when I was little, one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up was a writer.

I probably should have specified what kind of writer.

Unlike whyyy, I do not have a set career path, which is good and bad. It's good because I don't feel tied down to any committed job, and it's bad because I have no real direction in life, and no one or thing to tell me what to do. Like my friend who works at a publishing house, I don't think I want to stay here forever, but don't know what I should be doing instead. I'm kind of convinced the things I like doing (drawing comics, for instance) won't actually get me anywhere. So I play video games. It's pretty depressing.

The Good Thing About Being in Medical School

So, I go to medical school, which means that at some point in the future, so long as I pass all my exams and do not intentionally kill someone (at least I think they forgive us if it's unintentional), I presumably will be a doctor. I am not looking forward to this. Like most good little Asians, I started off down the path to doctor-hood because Mommy and Daddy had convinced me that there were only three occupations in the world: doctors, lawyers, and losers who should just kill themselves. Even later, when I realized that there actually were other jobs to be had, I was really too scared to even consider them for the fear of somehow shaming my family.

At some point, though, I did get sort of excited about becoming a doctor. I mean, you get to do some crazy stuff to people and they'd better like it because you are SAVING LIVES. A picture Tetradecimal drew of me sums up how I sort of started seeing my future self, all starry-eyed and shooting rainbows out of my hands.
Actually, I thought I'd look a little less goofy and more smart. Experienced. Like a war-torn veteran. But angelic and compassionate, like Mother Theresa, so I could magically touch the hearts and lives of my patients in ways other doctors had failed. Like that Patch Adams movie, although what I actually remember is that he built a giant vagina around a building entrance, and that his girlfriend got murdered, but let's not nitpick. I'd be that doctor who bonded with the autistic child or the gruff elderly patient who's just hurting inside.

Also, I thought I'd be sexier. That way, as I strolled purposefully down the hospital halls to SAVE LIVES, all the staff would notice me and say, "There goes that hot doctor. But she's more awesome than most hot people because she is also smart and kind." A real badass mix of House plus Mother Theresa plus Jessica Rabbit.

Needless to say, once I hit the wards, I realized that no, I was not going to be House plus Mother Theresa. I guess Jessica Rabbit is still a possibility if I start saving up for plastic surgery or something. In fact, I wasn't sure I wanted to be a doctor anymore (and most nights, I just wanted to survive until the next day and maybe get some goddamn sleep).

But that's okay. It's always better to look at the bright side of things, right? And so, I brainstormed the good things about being in medical school, some of which they actually taught us. Like, if I decided I wanted to be a drug addict as well, I would actually have an easier time than most people because I would have access to narcotics and other fun stuff; hell if I had doctor friends they might actually write me prescriptions because surveys have shown doctors are too chickenshit to tattle on their friends. So yay!

And I get to develop a god-complex for saving lives. And while this is certainly not unique, since police and firefighters do that shit too, I don't have to do it while being shot at or putting out raging fires. Yay again!

I guess, though, for now, until I decide to develop a drug habit or actually save lives, the best part about being in med school are the super fun stories you get to hear. For example, one of my friends was doing a neurology rotation. He went with his neurologist to do a spinal tap on a patient. This means you're trying to suck out spinal fluid without hitting all the nerves running through the spinal cord. Failing to do so can mean some major damage and suckitude. Like all beginning medical students, my friend had never done one before. The encounter went as such:

In the end, the patient was fine and I don't think he suffered any major neurological damage. Maybe next time I will tell the tale of when I cut someone's leg off.

The Circus

After we met, I realized that we had many shared interests. Like unicorns. Some of the other little girls liked cats, but that was dumb because unicorns were horses with MAGICAL HORNS, and the only thing better than unicorns was a UNICORN-PEGASUS (plural: unicorn-pegasi). This was very important. 

It was very important because at some point in Kindergarten, between burdening belaguered high school volunteers with ravings about my stuffed bear (who looked almost exactly like Benzaie's Beary-- WHERE DO YOU BUY THIS BEAR?) and making poorly-conceived ladybugs out of construction paper, I was informed that we would be putting on a CIRCUS.

This meant that all the little children in my class needed to dress up in poorly-constructed animal costumes and perform tricks for our parents, most likely as a kind of consolation. I mean, sure, you carried some dopey kid in your stomach for the better part of a year as your body ballooned with retained water and you ached and you felt horrible and ugly and it was all for the sake of nourishing a not-yet-sentient parasite gorging itself on your blood and nutrients and crushing your bladder and filling your poor taxed stomach with pee and it'll probably cost $2 million until you're finally free of your obligation to it and it'll grow up to resent you for cooking, cleaning, and caring for it for years, sacrificing years of free time and emotional energy to a sullen, uncommunicative psychopath you can only hope magically transforms into a real person while your husband complains loudly that YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING and IT'S YOUR JOB TO RAISE THE KIDS and then your mother-in-law is like WHY DON'T YOU EVER COME TO SEE US WE LOVE TO SEE OUR GRANDCHILDREN, BUT AT LEAST IT CAN NOW PERFORM CIRCUS TRICKS FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT. THAT IS THE IMPORTANT PART. YOU MUST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION NOW.

Anyway, the point is that we could all choose various circus animals to be. Whyyy and I insisted that we should totally be unicorns. But our teacher insisted that THERE ARE NO UNICORNS IN A CIRCUS, and so we needed to cosplay actual animals that were real and existed.

So we wanted to be ponies.

The only problem was, there was already a girl who was a pony (perhaps reasoning that the decree from above would enforce strict NO UNICORNS policy). So only one of us could be a pony.

I don't know how it was decided who would be pony and who would be not-pony, but in the end, I ended up being a tiger. It was a little disappointing. My mom made me a tail and apparently filmed me turning in little circles on a stand, because that is apparently what tigers do at the circus. She also had footage of Whyyy, who was apparently having a grand time being a "PRANCING PONY" and galloping about the gym mats.

But I wanted to be a pony.

Much later, my dad taped over The Circus footage with a recording of a televised golf tournament.

How did you meet? (part 2)

Sigh. This normally ranks as one of the questions I hate most having posed to me, usually during one of those awkward get-togethers with some close friends who you actually like having in your life but then there are those dreaded semi-friends-of-friends that you are somehow expected to chum up with purely on the basis of the fact that your close (and regrettably more sociable) friends seem to think they’re okay. And THEN, because they don’t know you well enough to start a conversation that you’re actually interested in, these semi-friends ask you inane questions like, “So what are your plans this weekend?” like they actually gave a shat. Which they don’t, for the 0.11% of you people who are still friendly and chipper and young in the ways of the world.

Pardon the bizarre metaphorical imagery of my mind. Also, the reason I rant instead of talking about how we met is for one, I am an angry and bitter person who probably needs a better outlet, and two, I also do not recall how we met. As such, the button-stealing story seems as good as any.

But...since I am the one who got all excited after brainstorming this topic, I guess I should put some effort into coming up with something. It had to be either kindergarten or first grade, because the teachers were told to start separating our homerooms and classes starting in second grade. And I think it was the first day of school, because I was very very very anxious to have a friend. I remember looking around the classroom for someone with a face as desperate and self-conscious as my own, a "I'll-be-your-friend tell-tale face" of sorts. But somehow everyone seemed to already be chatting with the kid next to them.

And then..I remember relief. Hope. I was saved. My eyes had fallen on another classmate who wasn't talking to anyone just yet. A girl. An Asian girl. Just. Like. MEEEEEE. Surely she could not reject me!

And so I shuffled over and said hi or something. ...And that's seriously all I can remember. That's right. I was a dumb racist little snot who chose her first, best, and almost-only friend because she was Asian. I say "almost-only" because I had one other friend in elementary school. Who was also Asian. But then in high school she was "born again" and decided I was the devil and then we weren't really friends anymore. But whatever, that's another story.

How did you meet?

Many friendships have begun with some kind of auspicious beginning that foreshadows the greatness that is to come. For example, um.

Like that time I was playing Devil May Cry, and then the Alastor sword came out of nowhere and stabbed Dante, and then there was blood everywhere and he just kind of lifted himself up through the sword instead of pulling it out, and then it was like JESUS WHAT IS YOUR RIB CAGE MADE OF, DELICIOUS FLAN? but then he grabbed Alastor and there was lightning and then it was like WHOOOOOOOO now I can pretend I'm Saitou Hajime GATOTSUUUUUUU

The point is, after that moment, Dante and his sword were BEST FRIENDS, and tons of great stuff happened afterward, at least until the part with the grenade launcher and the lizard men.

That is why our first topic is How We Met.