Dreams die hard

Here is a posting from an anonymous blog, quoted in its entirety. I won't even list the URL, but -- pardon my emphasis:

New job!

Hey, just a quick post to update everyone. Just got a part-time job at Barnes & Noble, which I start on Monday. The pay is not the best, but I get health insurance after 60 days, yay! (This will be the first time I've had health insurance since graduating from college two and half years ago.) I'm definitely excited to not be in an office and dealing with computers for a while.

Also have a new tutoring student who I'll be helping study for a test to get into a private middle school. Should be fun.

Screenwriting expo was fantastic this weekend! I'll be posting about that pretty soon.

A guy who graduated from college two and a half years ago, and the best thing he can do is get a part time job at B&N for the insurance; meanwhile he spent at least $180 for a pass to Screenwriting Expo. At California's minimum wage of $7.25, that works out to a little less than 25 hours of shelving books and running the cash register -- say, four shifts, and probably a week's work if he's a part-timer. So he just spent a quarter of his monthly income on Screenwriter Expo.

I think anybody who saw the film Adaptation with its scene in the Master Screenwriter class led by a fat blowhard understands something of the pathetic situation -- or nature -- of the nation's tens of thousands of would-be screenwriters. Since I'm an unpublished novelist -- and in fact I worked for a few months at Borders a while back -- I am hardly in a position to mock. Still, I did wait until I had a real job again before paying to attend a writers conference. Maybe it's the unrealistic people who become -- or want to become -- screenwriters.