So close, yet so far!

Today could have been one of the coolest days of my life. Hands down. But it wasn’t.

Why you ask? Well let me tell you.

So I’ve been following @donaldmilleris on twitter since I found out he had one. That’s the author Donald Miller, for those who don’t know. I’m a big fan of his books: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Desserts, and To Own a Dragon among others. I love his books because they are real stories about real people that don’t require subjective interpretation to understand/appreciate. His writing is very conversational, meaning that he doesn’t use words you would expect to see on the GRE or LSAT. Instead he uses words that average people can relate to and understand. To borrow from the movie Almost Famous, he’s real.

That being said, Donald Miller is coming out with a new book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. It’s going to be on shelves shortly, like less than a week. However, he has been hiding copies of the manuscript with a cover letter, his phone number, and autograph around the states. Each day on twitter he would post the location of these manuscripts and people would have to go find them. I have been waiting and waiting for one to be in San Antonio! There was Dallas, Houston, Abilene, Austin, but no San Antonio. But then! Today he said he was having a grand finale of like 13 being given away all at once. So I checked twitter between classes and BAM! One in San Antonio! Even better, it was like two exits down from UTSA where I go to school! Problem! I had a class I had to go to like 10 minutes from then, so I couldn’t go. But as soon as class was over I bolted for my roommates car, that he willing let me borrow, and headed toward the location.

Mind you, this is now about two hours after I noticed the post on twitter. My thoughts were, “Well he hasn’t updated twitter saying it was found, and I don’t know if anyone else from San Antonio is following him on twitter…” Psh, it’s a town of a couple million…someone else has to be following him.

Either way, I sped over to this place, jumped out of the car, and ran inside…to the wrong building. Then I ran into the right one, but to no avail…someone had been there (probably within 10 minutes of the twitter post) and picked up the manuscript. Sigh… Oh well, as a consolation I got a free audio copy of his book Blue Like Jazz.

So I drove with caution and patience back to school dropped the roommates car back off at the dorms and headed back to campus to catch my final class that started in about 30 minutes.

Had I been able to skip class, I could have had the coolest day of my life. Not to say today sucked, because it was awesome in that I even had the opportunity to get this manuscript.

Thanks Don for picking San Antonio to hide one of those bad boys!