There are good days and well...

There will be bad days...

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that we can do about either of them. They just seem to come and go as they please.

There are some days that are amazing, when you see your name published on websites that you never thought you'd see it published and people think you're sooooo cooool (omfgggg).

Then, there are other days when you realize that your smart friends went on to have careers more relevant to our degrees after grad school and make almost twice as much money as you do, despite the fact that you have the same degree and had similar grades.

And though that sucks a lot of times, there are days when you're happy you're not doing what "they're" doing because you think you're making your way to where you eventually want to end up (just like they are, but they seem a lot closer to it), no matter the cost - financially and in terms of swallowing your pride every now and again, or well, every day.

Not every, but most every 20 something seems to reach a point of mid-20's crisis in their lives.

Me? I don't think I'm at that point. I think that I've become too emotionally detached from pretty much anything and everything to feel like I'm ever at any kind of crisis. Everything generally operates at a level that I like to call "a little better than ok."

However, I have to admit that there are days when unjamming printers and supplying my wing of the office with semi-perishable snacks is not the easiest thing in the whole world.

In the office world, someone else jamming the printer or the printer running out of toner becomes a complete disaster.

A mean email or passive aggressive IM sends people into a tailspin of "wtf"-ness. People panic. F-words are exchanged. Well-dressed people in pressed shirts start running down hallways in their wingtipped kicks.

Somehow, this administrative world that is such a big part of many a 20-something's life manages to create drama that believes it is something much worse (it's not) than running out of footballs at a 3 day high school football camp that you just figured out the logistics for over the course of 15 minutes at 5:45AM for a camp that starts at 7:00AM.

5 minutes without laser printer toner, paper clips, or even your free snacks that you pay for running out somehow becomes more of a disaster than having a football coach keep telling you to "get your f*cking sh!t together" for almost 12 hours straight after that coach has no idea that you were working until 3AM in the morning the night before just to make sure he had a clean shirt to wear.

There are some days when I think about how we made full marketing plans in grad school, communication plans, and somewhere along the way, I wrote a long paper that we called a thesis. And there are some days that are tougher than others to just swallow one's pride, grin, and bear it.

Most days, I'm happy to do it. Other days, it doesn't come too easy. I've been having a few of those days lately.

When people ask me about what I'm doing, or about how it is to be an assistant after grad school, my first response is that it's "character building." Really, it is.

I've learned a lot and I feel lucky to be where I am, but man, it is character building.

Being an assistant is exactly what being a student manager for a college football team is. There are moments of greatness and excitement and moments of "I can't believe I am picking up dog sh!t with my hands" (football only).

Hopefully, it gets me to where I want to be, but it's hard not to think that you have to get there yourself sometimes.

Hanging in. Almost Wednesday.

Inspiration via Ugly Betty / "Talk is Cheap"

As many of my close friends know, I generally have backwards weeks.

What does this mean? It means that I like to go out and see people Monday - Thursday and that I'd rather be home and relax or casually catch up with friends Friday - Sunday. I don't really know why, but that's just the way my life is right now and I find that it keeps me pretty sane.

So tonight, along with doing some deep thinking (deciding that I don't think I'm ready just yet financially and in terms of making personal and professional sacrifices to take the plunge and get a dog), I stayed in on this rainy Friday evening to catch up with one of my favorite TV shows - Ugly Betty.

Betty la Fea - !en ingles!

As most of us know, Ugly Betty (produced by Salma Hayek) is one of the most popular shows on ABC and is the American take on the telenovela Betty la Fea. Betty Suarez [Emmy award winner America Ferrera] is an executive assistant to the editor in chief of a fictional fashion magazine called MODE. While Betty works through the trials and tribulations of her dramatized for television life at the office and at home, she takes the job at MODE initially because she thought that it would give her the opportunity to become a professional writer, which is what she hoped to do after writing for the school newspaper at "Queens College."

In the most recent episode, Betty is challenged to pursue her writing and her dreams by a sandwich guy named Gio. To sum up what Gio said to her, we'll steal a line from the one and only DMX.

"Talk is cheap, mothaf*cka."

Eloquently put, Mr. X.... eloquently put.

While Betty tells people that she wants to be a writer, she hadn't really done any writing since getting her assistant gig at MODE. She decides that she wants to take a writing course and that even though her writing opportunities have not really come to her (aside from one episode last season where she wrote for Salma Hayek's magazine in the Meade publication family), she was going to make her own opportunities.

It's not often that I watch TV and see similarities to my own life. Because most of my TV watching consists of shows on MTV filled with rich Caucasian women, along with reality-based competitions, it's hard to find much in common for me in my TV viewing. However, this episode of Betty really struck a chord with me.

Fab inspiration.

Ok, so the obvious similarities are as follows:
- Betty is an executive assistant. I am an executive assistant.
- Betty wrote for her school newspaper. I wrote for my school newspaper
- Betty got good grades. I got good grades.
- Betty has many bad hair days. I have many bad hair days.
- Betty has stuffed animals on her desk at work. I have stuffed animals on my desk at work (though mine always looks like someone came in and trashed it looking for confidential documents in a Watergate-like frenzy...I still know where stuff is)

And really, as soon as I gave up on that whole "I want to work in sports" thing after taking one too many "f-words" after three years with the USC Football team, I've been wanting to write for a career. For that reason, that's why getting the chance to blog for Billboard was such a big deal to me. Even more, that's why winning that competition was a bigger deal for me. My sentences are simple and writing is unbelievably colloquial, but it always has been and it meant a lot to me that I was still able to win a competition and find an audience when put up against 25 other writers around the country without having to adjust my own style.

While it's annoying, especially to people who subscribe to an RSS feed on my blog, that's why I shamelessly promote any of my news items on AmericanIdol.com here on DaveChung.com, so I can have a place where I can see all my clips and hopefully have people read them and enjoy them. Every time I see my name up on Idol, I know that my story could be read by a few thousand people that day and even though they're often not the most exciting stories in the world and don't allow me to have any kind of voice, something about that makes me really proud. So far, that feeling hasn't gotten old for me.

Last Tuesday, I was interviewed by Mitch Peters, who is a touring writer for Billboard Magazine. We sat down in The Hollywood Reporter's studio and did a face to face interview on camera that Billboard will be using for some conferences later this year (if they post it on Billboard.com, you know I'll post it here). We talked about the Mobile Beat competition, challenges, feelings, concerts, etc. and it was a ton of fun. It was one of the bigger thrills that I've had in a while (and there's been a lot) to get interviewed by one of the authorities in music today. I thought I did a pretty good job, though I kept saying "ehhh..." before answering a question for some reason and hopefully that half hour will turn into one great 3 minute clip. And while that clip won't get me a job, it reminded me why I want to write for a job.

If I'm not writing, I can't say that I want to be a writer. If I'm not blogging, I can't keep saying that I want to have a successful blog that people know about. If I'm not doing either, I'm no different than those people who don't go watch movies, go to new websites, watch TV, or listen to the radio, because they "hate everything that's mainstream" yet claim that they want to work in the entertainment industry (that's stupid).

Beyond that, I need to start reading more. I get 5 magazines and I barely find the time to read any of them. BusinessWeek, NewsWeek, Billboard, Maxim, and Entertainment Weekly come to my apartment or desk at work on a very regular basis and I rarely ever find the time to read them. If I want to be a writer, I need to appreciate what's already out there and stop pretending like I can make it without understanding what I need to try and become.

Talk is cheap and I'm realizing that I need to find that motivation again.