Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Hi there! My name is Jamie and I am currently an English major at Florida Gulf Coast University, hoping to add a double minor of creative writing and psychology to my program. I have been out of high school six years, and just decided on this major program at the end of last year, and I am super excited about it.
I hope to use my major/minors to be a writer. Now I know that is a broad word, but I plan to fully explore the whole spectrum of writing throughout my career. There is no facet of writing that does not appeal to me. I just love words. I love reading words, I love hearing words. I love when certain words echo in my head inexplicably for days at a time. I love "surreptitious" and "clandestine" and words that aren't quite as slutty also.
However, as far as my career goes, I would like to write for magazines. I am going to be that girl in the romantic comedy who goes to my interview with the big fashion magazines and begs my editor to take me seriously and let me write socially conscious articles. She will tell me that first I need to spend a few years writing about mani/pedis and the fall/spring/summer/winter look. And that's if I'm lucky.
I took my career path from one of my favorite authors, Oscar Wilde, after "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" changed my life a few years ago. He wrote for a women's magazine for many years, and Oscie (as I call Mr. Wilde) scholars say that his best fiction works were written while he wrote for the magazine. Similarly, my best fiction writings have come when I've been innundated with writing assignments for school.
My life is a puzzle and for the last few years I've been collecting the pieces, and I've only just begun to put them together.
I want to save the world, or at least one little part of it. This is that corner of the puzzle that you know you can put together if you can just find the rest of the border pieces in the huge pile of similarly patterned pieces. I know that I feel drawn to Africa, where my lifelong dream of riding a zebra may finally come true :). And, I know that I am drawn to lions. So, I am thinking about maybe dedicating my life to writing about lion conservation in light of the societies struggling to exist alongside these regal creatures, who have become prey for the lions. But, most likely I will just let myself fall into the natural flow of chance and see where it takes me. I have been reading about inspirational people like Greg Mortensen and Rupert Isaacson, who have given so much of themselves to help their little corners of the world, and I can only hope to be a hundredth of the inspiration that they are.
The thing that draws me to men like Mortensen and Isaacson is that they are so respectful of other cultures, and eager to learn the ways of other people without imposing their personal lifestyles upon them. This cultural worldview is something that is noticably absent in American Society today, and it is kind of a shame.
On a lighter note, I also love riding horses. I have a budding interest in photography and the Tampa Bay Rays. My black lab mix dog is my world. I have an unnatural obsession with the disney channel. I don't eat meat, but I do eat fish occasionally.
I just got over the biggest heartbreak of my life, and that experience has colored, and will continue to color my writing and my perspective on the world for sometime to come. But, not in a miserable way. He is an amazing person who has taught me so much about love, life, and everything in between. And though it took me two years to finally let him go, I wouldn't have traded a moment.
I spend my summers working on a train in Anchorage, Alaska, and plan on continuing to do so until I can come up with the funds to extend my travel plans beyond what is technically considered the United States. Although, anyone who has ever been to Alaska for an extended period of time knows that it is kind of a world apart. It took me two summers to realize it, but I love Alaska. I love working for the train, where I have met some of the most amazing, inspirational people of my life. Even the less amazing, inspirational people have been fantastic, because they will make wonderful characters for some future novel, screenplay or short story.
That's not to say that the people I've met living on Fort Myers Beach won't make good characters, because they, too, are crazy dynamic people whom I love writing about.
So, that, in a rather lengthy nutshell is who I am. Today. Tomorrow is a whole other story. . .