Too Many Words...

What do you wanna be?

I wonder if there will ever be a point when I stop asking myself what I want to be when I grow up. Much like just about everyone that reads this thing (myspace mods?) I'm at a very indecisive point in my life as far as choosing a career goes. Perhaps I need a better method to track down the ideal position rather than the effective but time consuming 'process of elimination'.


When I was a kid I wanted to be an ice cream salesman, so I could give free ice cream to everyone. Now of course being a member of the human race I would have to include myself in the recipient list, which deep down may have been the less noble root to that career choice. If there was any justice in the world I would have been a very fat kid. In any case I abandoned that goal long before I was able to formulate the business plan about profiting off of giving ice cream away. Nowadays I can only think it would have involved prescription company underwriting- lacing the rocket pops with experimental drugs and cataloging the reactions. BTW did anyone ever get any cool swag with Popsicle Pete Points when they were kids? Me neither.


The next thing I can remember wanting to be was a comic book artist. Don't worry this will be the last one I relate, otherwise this will be a long self indulgent blog. Rather than a short one. I think I was like 8 or 9 when I decided that I wanted to draw comic books. Now I was never the most talented artist, which I'm sure would have posed a problem somewhere along the line. So I ordered a book on how to draw comic books. It helped a lot with my self confidence. Cause I could tell that even I was just about as good as the hack that wrote that book. When you get right down to it I think I ran into troubles when I discovered that I didn't want to draw comics so much as just kinda be a superhero. And my characters sucked. I had three main ones that I drew, the first one called "Flat Head". Due to a motorcycle accident onto some radioactive waste the top of his head was flat, and very hard. That was about the extent of his powers. Bad guys would like throw grenades and cars and stuff at him and he would block it with his head. Can't really say why I stuck with that character for so long. Then there was 'Eagle Man', now to get an idea of this hero just think of 'Hawkman' and change the color scheme. Boggles my mind that I never made the connection as a kid. Then there was 'F-Minus' a surfer looking kid that could reduce the friction on objects and himself and basically fly, run fast and project things (things will go very far without friction). The idea for him just came out of nowhere and was probably my most original. And who knows, if the steps to becoming a comic book artist were solely doodling in the margins of Hilroy paper during every class for two years I might just have made it.


But with both of those as well as many others (martial arts instructor, psychologist, medieval knight etc…) I didn't really feel any regret when moving on from them as I had basically outgrown the ideas. And it does make me feel better about my future thinking back to how wide open the possibilities seemed to me as a kid. Except for the knight thing. That was just stupid.

Anyone else got some funny former ambitions they care to relate?