Sarah Vowell

I don’t know what I want to be when I “grow up.” I am majoring in electrical engineering, but I know that I don’t want to be an engineer – I crave security, but I really need some creativity in my life. When asked, I generally tell people that I want to write, but that is really just an oversimplification. What I really want to do is get paid to be eclectic. And I really didn’t think that was an option until I found out about Sarah Vowell.

The first I knew about her was one night a year or so ago when she appeared on The Daily Show. I didn’t pay too much attention to her, but I remembered how unusual her voice was and that she seemed interesting and intelligent. So when she came on again a few months later to promote her latest book, Assassination Vacation, I listened more intently.

It was a complete coincidence when I found a hardback copy of The Partly Cloudy Patriot for $4 at a book outlet less than a month after the second time I saw Vowell on The Daily Show. Of course I picked it up, and by the end of the second essay, I had a new favourite. I identify ridiculously well for her for being a politically moderate, agnostic country girl instead of a liberal, atheistic city girl. It’s in the details, though, where Vowell’s personality and background are a lot like mine. Or at least, mine are headed toward hers – I’m still working on that whole “making it” thing. Oh, and I’m much more interested in math and science than history and politics. But still...

By the time I had finished the book, I had found my hero. Well, my professional hero. Terry Pratchett is still my literary hero, Ed Robertson is my musical hero, and my grandfather is my hero in the cheesy kindergarten sort of way. But Sarah Vowell does what I want to do. She’s a novelist, a columnist, a radio show editor, a sometimes-voice-actress, a friend of TMBG’s, and an all around Renaissance woman.

It has since dawned on me that I’ve had a perfectly good candidate for my professional hero for several years now. In fact, the other person is more closely associated with what I am interested in eventually doing, being more interested in science and technology, as well as environmental concerns, than politics and history and whatnot. But (though I usually don’t think like this – at least not now, and at least not consciously, being now the kind of feminist who wants equality despite gender rather than equality because of gender) I suppose that it really does help Vowell’s case that she is a woman and Douglas Adams was a man.

So really I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want to someday be like Vowell. I want to be involved in the entertainment industry in a similar way, I hope that I will one day be able to overcome my suffocating terror of public speaking, and I would love someday to be able to figure out how to balance my patriotism and my cynicism as well as she seems to.

Either that, or I’ll have moved to England and forgotten the whole mess.

Go on, Take the Cannoli
Page written July 4, 2005, but posted August 4, 2005, because I’m what, ladies and gentlemen? A _bum_!