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I am almost 28 years old and I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. My girlfriend and I recently discussed some career options, which basically involved driving down the road and her telling me that I could be whatever sort of person worked in the building we were passing, such as a surgeon when driving past the hospital, etc. It was a pretty productive talk.

Since then I have sort of been thinking about what I thought I wanted to be when I was younger. Let’s take a look at some jobs that I thought I’d want to do and why I know better now.

Astronaut

• The idea: I think that most kids (maybe just boys?) want to be an astronaut at some point. The biggest draw is that you’d get to go into frickin’ OUTER SPACE. How cool is that? Maybe see some aliens? At the very least you’d get all the freeze-dried ice cream you could eat. In school they always made it seem like being an astronaut was pretty much the coolest thing you could do.
• The reality: Spending a hell of a lot of time in a very tiny space with some people who probably get to smelling sorta rank after a little while. Yeah, the view of earth would be awesome, but you are pretty much working all the time. Not to mention all the time you’d be away from your family (this might be a bonus for some people). As awesome as zero gravity would be, I bet it gets old. And I apologize for being gross, but I bet the space shuttle is like a big Dutch oven, and you can’t just roll the windows down in space.

Advertising Executive

• The idea: I’d get to sit around and think up hilarious TV commercials. People would call me up all the time and say, “Hey, man, I saw your commercial for _____. My wife literally gave herself a hernia laughing so hard!” Then we would high-five each other over the phone before I got cracking on the next 30-second window into my genius.
• The reality: I’d probably get stuck doing assloads of market research and coming up with print ads for old lady multivitamins. And since I hate advertising, I’d wake up every morning despising myself for unleashing a plague of product promotion on the planet.

Scrooge McDuck

• The idea: I’d have a giant vault of money I could swim around in.
• The reality: I’d totally break my neck diving into an enormous pile of loose change. Also, Scrooge was kind of old, and despite the fact that he was the richest duck in all of wherever he lived (much to the chagrin of Flintheart Glomgold), he never really had any sexy young duck chickies hanging around. Just his three nephews. Hugh Hefner, he was not.

Oddly enough, the one job I always thought I would be near the bottom of my list of desired occupations (teacher) is now working its way toward the top. I don’t know if I really want to make a difference in kids’ lives or if I just want to have a summer vacation for the rest of my life, but either way it’s a pretty sweet gig. The obvious downside is the the pay, which you can bump up for going to school for forever and a day. Crap pay vs. more school is sort of a push for me, so I’ll just keep going to school to be whatever it is that I’ll end up being.

Who knows, maybe if I keep at this long enough I’ll be able to slap a bunch of blog posts together, call it a book, and have a career as a writer.

*re-reading post*

Okay, so maybe not.