Part Two

In one of the writing classes I'm taking this semester, I'm learning about how to write non-fiction. All kinds of non-fiction. While we're currently working on a memoir, we were challenged to write about a moment that "stopped us in our tracks". When I think on this cliche, I am reminded of something I read for that class. The author of the article encouraged writers to use every part of their lives as subjects, everything can be turned into something. So, while I am not the type to mix business and pleasure, I want to write about someone I met at my job. Someone who changed my outlook on life.

I have worked as a server in a local store of a corporate-run restaurant for three years now. Every September, we do a fundraiser for St. Jude's Children's Hospital, which, for those who don't know, is a hospital located in Memphis that specializes in childhood cancer. (Cancer is a big deal to me, as my mom died with it when I was 19 years old.) Last September, a little boy came into our restaurant who was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, which I found out (after google-ing it) is a cancer that hits children. It can be found anywhere in the body, but it is usually not found until after it has already spread. Back to the boy.

His name is Ethan. While he has never been in St. Jude's, one of my manager's felt a special pull to this little boy, and we have made him our mascot. One year after we first met him, Ethan is now working some weekend shifts as a "server" in an effort to help raise money for children like him. He is ten years old.

I got the honor to actually meet and work alongside Ethan two weeks ago. I wasn't feeling well, so I was going into work with a bad attitude, just ready to leave. Ethan walked into the restaurant, and I stopped. I couldn't feel bad anymore. I had to lose the attitude. Here was a little boy who could be mad about everything. His childhood was gone, he was sick. Yet he was so full of life. He was cracking jokes, on my boss and my co-workers, nonetheless! Ethan found out September 13, last Tuesday, that he is in remission. I've worked with him again since then, and he was exactly the same. Cracking jokes, working hard to help other kids struggling with the same fight he's fighting. My life is changed.

This may seem like something that could change anyone's outlook, at least for a little while. But I honestly believe that everytime I think of this little boy so bravely fighting for his life, I'm reminded how blessed I am in mine.

Chapter 1

This is a new chapter in my life... my first time blogging, my first (and only) time being married. I know my married life is going to be a wonderful and beautiful thing, but I don't have any idea what this blog is going to turn into, as I feel people tend to abuse blogs for their own devices. So maybe I should begin with what I feel a blog is (or isn't).

I don't think a blog is a place to rant and rave about things. I know blogs are used as escapes, as a way for humans to vent about the unhappy happenings of their lives, but honestly, who wants to read about how miserable you are? No one honestly cares that you don't like raisins in your carrot cake, and I personally don't want to spend 20 minutes of my time reading about how raisins are an abomination and should be destroyed in the forth-coming zombie apocolypse.

I think a blog can be used to document a life, even if it isn't yours. Why not go a little wacko and create a person, a character (for all the "writers" out there) and make them a blog? Wouldn't it be a wonderful way to help create and develop the person you are inventing.

And if you are documenting your own life, why not do it in blog-form? Rather than creating a fictitious character and developing them, why not make your blog a little like a diary and find out how you develop as a person? Who knows, a hundred and forty years from now someone may stumble over one of these prehistoric devices we call desktops and come across your blog and realize that maybe we weren't as stupid as history makes us seem.