In 2004 I was in a death-metal band, and I was a self-employed garbage man (every rumor you've heard about how much money garbage men make is true, by the way).
Anyway, I applied to UCLA as a plan B, which worked out. The band broke up (for then), and I was accepted. At UCLA I devoted pretty much every second I had to being the best fiction writer ever. Why I did this I don't really know. Good writers make no money, while bad writers are almost immediately wealthy. I guess it's because I would like to leave behind a legacy of work and ideas. So far all of my ideas are either silly or crazy, but it's a start.
After UCLA I was a senior editor for a magazine here in Los Angeles for a year. The magazine shall not be named. It was a college culture magazine, and it had B-actresses on the cover every month. Often in this magazine we had advertisements for things like energy drinks, and then "editorial" stories right next to those ads about energy drinks, if you get me. But I did some fun stuff there. I got to interview the cast of Reno 911, Dave Eggers, Broken Lizard, Ben Gleib, and other stuff.
After I left this magazine, I went through a sort of dark period that consisted of beer, free lance writing jobs, and beer. At one point I was asked to be the Content Manager for a very, very boring company that handles government grants. Another job almost had me writing celebrity-style publicity stories about lawyers in Pasadena. Needless to say, I was very happy to find Mahalo and I feel at home here.
In very recent news, I am engaged, to a girl from England I met at UCLA, named Emily.
There are many things I am passionate about, and here are a few:
Fiction and literature (novels, short stories, writing, and boring old books that people don't read anymore. And magazines)
Video games. Perhaps a third of my brain is video games, which I think is good.
Music. I've been a guitarist/bassist for 13 years and was a guitar major for a year in Canada. (Note: music theory is harder than anyone understands. It's like math but a thousand times worse). All of the bands that I've been in since age 13 have been metal bands.
I'm here to try and make Mahalo the best website on the web, and I look forward to creating result pages that have equal parts personality and utlity.
I'm not really sure how to end this. Do I say "thanks" or "cheers" or something? I'll just end it I guess.
-Mark B.
