'It's All Happening'

"Almost Famous" was on HBO this weekend. It had been entirely too long since I'd watched it, so it felt so good to curl up on the couch and reunite with William and Penny and Russell, Stillwater, The Band Aids and all the rest. The movie is truly fantastic—honest, sweet, funny, heartbreaking, inspiring. Very few scenes are as simply perfect as the band singing along to "Tiny Dancer" on the bus after a nearly catastrophic fight.

I started reading Rolling Stone in junior high, the magazine's interviews and reviews a definite step up from what I'd been reading in teenybopper magazines up until that point. Inspired by interviews I read in the magazine, the bands whose faces covered my bedroom walls and Patricia Kennealy Morrison's memoir "Strange Days" (which I mentioned before), I set my sights on being a rock journalist.

It was such a solid plan. I spent a year-and-a-half on the high school newspaper staff, contributed a few columns to the local newspaper and majored in journalism in college. I wrote and edited for the school paper, was a stringer for the entertainment section of another local paper, and as graduation approached, I felt confident I could get that job I dreamed of with MTV or Rolling Stone, maybe not right away, but I could build to it.

I did have an interview at MTV once. Gideon Yago got the job. I contributed reviews and interviews to online and print publications, and was the contributing editor for aU2 fansite for several years, which was probably the closest I came to living out that teenage dream.

I was one year out of college when "Almost Famous" was released and it felt like my story, or at least the story I'd craft for myself if given the power. My mouth dropped open during the following scene:

"William Miller? William, this is Ben Fong Torres, I'm the music editor at Rolling Stone magazine. We got a couple of your stories from the San Diego Door. ... Listen, I think you should be writing for us."

I turned to my companion that night and said I wanted to hear those words. Sadly, 12 years later, I never have.

I wanted that dream for most of my life. At some point, the importance of having a dependable job with health insurance, a somewhat livable salary and a 401(k) grew, as did the realization that every spring journalism schools across the country were sending junior me's out into the world and the competition would be tougher and tougher and tougher. I gave up on that dream, though I did start A Joyful Noise to be my outlet for those remaining William Miller ambitions of mine.

It does feel strange not to have a dream job anymore. Now my career ambitions are less concrete, instead of imagining myself in a certain position for a certain publication, I think about what I'd like from a job, everything from the opportunities it provides me to the contribution that job can me make in the world.

I may not be William Miller, or his true-life counterpart Cameron Crowe when I grow up, but I hope to be the best at whatever it is I'm doing.