My first ever business cards just came in the mail and I am Freaking Out. They are amazing. I bought the matte-finish triple-ply cardstock premium option with rounded corners because I didn’t know any better and now I cannot stop looking at them; they are the fanciest things I own. They have a satisfying heavy kind of feeling when stacked and I am reluctant to give them away… Today I replaced my garbage disposal (which has rotted away from the sink due to being sixty-or-seventy years old) and I keep washing the foul debris off my hands and drying them carefully so I can touch these soft fancy cards for no reason.
It’s hard to convince myself that I deserve them, so I’ve been reading up on impostor syndrome* which is a thing all of my 20-something-college-grad friends have and it is ridiculous because they are all capable and qualified and talented and wonderful and they fully deserve the things they have worked for.
Making a website and ordering cards have been my most successfully procrastinated projects of all time-- for five years they have plagued my to-do lists-- but this year I came across a fortune cookie in a van door at the base of a hiking trail near an abandoned mine in Silverton, Colorado that read: “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” There are a lot of boring personal factors that contributed to the kick-in-the-pants that I gave myself this year after camp, but that dumb fortune cookie sure has echoed around in my hyper-active-post-camp-positive-attitude-everything-is-beautiful-in-the-late-summer-light-brain, and honestly it has been life-changing. (Note: I am not exaggerating. I am not fond of hyperbole. That dumb fortune cookie is changing my trajectories in very real ways.)
The point is, little concrete things like a website-that-is-not-a-Tumblr blog and fancy, soft, three-ply business cards are tiny steps towards predicting a future that doesn’t involve living under a bridge shouting riddles at bridge-users, or, more realistically, living in my parent’s basement until I’m sixty-or-seventy years old and I inherit the upstairs part of the house but am too old to make the ascent. I am pretty excited about creating this fortune-cookie-future and it’s 11:11 now so I’m going to go ahead and sign off with a wish that the Yellowstone Supervolcano does not erupt and ruin all of the things I am excited about. **
*Note: I originally typo-ed “impaster syndrome” and if you say that out loud to yourself you sound like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed and it is so funny to me. You should try it.
**Note Note: If you are out there wishing “No one else’s wishes come true,” and I know you are out there, you are the worst and I think you know it.