For awhile now I've known that I could never be condemned to a life of cubicles and Christmas parties like my father enjoyed for fifteen years. I was not cut out to be a doctor or a lawyer, so I assumed I'd be living the rest of my life as a penniless vagrant, taking on one petty job after another in order to obtain enlightenment. Yet today, a week into my three month servitude at the grocery store in which during the summer I find myself at more often than my own home, I had something therapists and zodiac fanatics most likely call a realization. I was walking past a stack of newspapers and I happened to glance down at one of them where a large picture took up most of the page. This picture did that funny ticklish thing to my heart, where you stop in your tracks and focus in on what it is that just made you lose all interest in anything else. It was an incredible picture taken in Iraq. A bomb had just exploded and in the center of the frame a small Iraqi boy stood behind a mammoth of an American soldier for protection. The boy looked absolutely petrified and the soldier stood tall, gun in hand, and whether or not he knew there was a young child clinging on to him for dear life was not evident. That photo just captured human nature so beautifully. We all get scared. Even Iraqis.

The picture before me defined what it is I wanted my life to accomplish. I want to give people that feeling, the kind where you see a picture during lunch break and imagine it again as you fall asleep, where you see a movie which propels your thought process for days, where you read a great article and the words stick with you for weeks. I want people to be aware of one another, to really stop and think. I want my work to evoke the "wow" from people.