“What’s My Passion?” excerpt from MJLiu dated March 17, 2009

I walked back into the shop, not knowing what to do for the rest of the day since obviously, business could not be had unless it was old-fashioned, hand-written receipt business, and Mondays have never, ever in the history of my working there been even a decent revenue-by-foot-traffic day. Ironically, there was a knock on the door. One of our regular customers, Jesus (pronounced Hey Zeus!), was standing outside. He’s a really chill guy, and he’s in with the right guys at the store because he can cop whatever he wants at a wholesale price. He came in, said what’s up as I explained the no electricity situation, and started rifling through the racks. I think if it had been any other customer it would’ve been awkward since the shop was dark and completely silent, but Jesus is just that chill of a guy. He understands us. He knows what we’re going through. We don’t have to hide the fact that we’re hustling as hard as we can just to scrape by month to month. As he looked around, I pulled out my laptop and started on the only project that I could do without the internet – calculating how much money I’m owed by the company. It took quite a while to get this going cos I’m a noob at excel and I also have quite a few unaccounted pay periods to manually input. As he looked around at different jackets, tees and jeans, we chopped it up a little.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what line of work are you in?”. I decide to strike up some simple conversation. He’s always been pretty well-kempt, and he always bought multiple items in the shop even during the heart of the recession, so I was genuinely interested. Maybe I was scoping for a line of work to get into. It turns out he’s a professional audio/music mixing technician and does mixing for a studio in the area and he was certified in a 9-month program at one of the LA-based academies. His line of work wasn’t hit that hard by the recession because, well, music still comes out regardless of the hard times and his studio is frequented by the right people. The conversation got to a point where we started talking about what we like to do, where we see ourselves and what we’re passionate about.

I thought for a moment. ”I like reading and writing. No real particular form, I just like doing it. I think that if I could, I would want to pursue that. I’m still trying to figure out the rest of my life though. God knows where I’ll be in a couple years. With money as tight as it is now , I don’t think I can keep working here up very much longer and I don’t know where I’ll be even a couple months from now. All I know is, if I can be passionate about my line of work, there’s nothing that’ll I have to do to stay motivated. I wouldn’t care about the hours I put in, the sacrifices I’d have to make. I’m not saying there won’t be times that I won’t be feeling ‘it’, but thats when you kick it into overdrive and see how far you can go”.

*I bolded and italicized certain things for my own notes.