Well I just finally finished my application for National Geographic: Glimpse. A friend sent me a link to the correspondents program and I jumped on it. Apparently the magazine courts young students, or travelers who are living abroad. It seems like most of the writing is rather blog-like, and filled with the puppy love awe of kids leaving their home countries for the first time, but resume+National Geographic in any form can hardly be a bad thing.
Anyway, one of the last parts of the massive application was to answer the simple question of: Why do you want to write for National Geographic: Glimpse. Which is pretty much the same thing as asking, "Why do you want to write." So I thought the tiny essay I cooked up would be pertinent to the community. And without further ado:
I was going to write something dramatic and poetic to garner favor for myself in this selection process but instead I’m going to go for bluntness. I write for entirely selfish reasons. I have been traveling fairly extensively for the last five years or so. Throughout all of these incredible experiences the desire to find some meaning in the rich and varied experiences in the world forces me to write my thoughts down. When I spend any significant amount of time without producing some kind of story, or poem, or simple travelogue about the things I’ve seen and done, I get angry at myself. I have read about the altruistic nature of this magazine, but I do not write because I want to explain some foreign culture to people who often suffer from ethnocentric tunnel vision. I write about the places I see because I want to understand the way other people live, and apply it to my own personal vision of the human being I want to be in my brief existence in this world. I write because I pursue every sensual and existential experience I can find and I have learned how quickly the intensity of memory pours into the forgotten ether of the world. I write because I have learned to hate offices, and learned to love the freedom of blank pages. I want to write for this magazine because I will be writing whether I get this position or not, and I would love nothing more to have a baseline, an editor, a purpose to strive for as I traverse the hidden places between tourist destinations. I want to write for this magazine because a Hemingway complex and a bottle of whiskey just isn’t enough most days. I want to write for this magazine to dare editors to tell me I’m not good enough, just to be motivated enough to show them that I am. I want to impress women by name dropping and impress parents with bylines. I want to write for this magazine because the feeling of ink on paper will always resonate stronger than words tumbling through mouse clicks on a rambling blog. I want this position because most people never look past the surface tension of the world, and I when I pierce the invisible skin of an inscrutable culture, I want someone to read it, and I want to know that somewhere across an ocean synapses are firing in completely different directions on the road to new thoughts because of something I wrote.