Inspiration nation.

So my friend Brett is really inspired to make me inspired to start writing. He asks me about it all the time, and yesterday, he sent me an email asking me about my project and then gave me a few exercises to do to get me started.

And you know, it worked. I spent the entire afternoon jogging between a mind-numbing PowerPoint of "actual work" and an exciting Word document of my thoughts and ideas, and for the first time at this job, the time flew by.

(I must admit that I felt some guilt about doing some personal work on work-time, but then again, my old boss at my old job used to tell me to do this stuff all the time. "You know Augusten Burroughs wrote his book working as a copywriter at an ad agency, " he would remind me when I would complain that I didn't have time to write, hinting that I should use my downtime at work for such things. The problem is that I never had downtime at my old job. That was then, this is now.)

Writing down my thoughts for my project was thrilling because suddenly, for the first time ever--even though I can now see that I have a ton of work ahead of me--it felt like this project was actually do-able.

Besides the once-in-a-while downtime, the one thing I do like about my current job is this girl named Colleen. She is super nice and has cool clothes and if she doesn't like something, she says it. She is also not jaded yet and so she comes up with creative ideas in our brainstorming meetings and sells them with more passion and gusto and sincerity than the average overworked magazine marketer.

She has been on some intense diet and workout regimen for the last 15 weeks and I notice people coming up to her and telling her how great she looks. We go to the same gym, and we've swapped stories about the cute guy who works at the front desk who winks at us and tell us to "work hard." I thought he liked me, but she thought so, too. We realized that he must like all the girls.

I was listening to her talk about her program and I let her know that I admired her for being so hardcore.

"Well, if you want something bad enough," she replied. "You just go for it."

I couldn't stop thinking about those words for the rest of the day.