Your Childhood Vision of the Adult You

Also:
Adventures Beyond the Solar System: Planetron and Me

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002KZ1.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Just thinking about writing for the Focus Group is filling me with anxiety and dread, so things didn't quite turn out the way I'd hoped.

i also thought i'd be married to the following people:

http://www.i-mockery.com/oedekerk/highstrung/HS-706.jpg

http://www.star-interviews.com/images/rikki-rockett.jpg

http://www.brooksguitarworld.com/artists/cc10.jpg

http://www.sebastianbach.com/archives/burrn1.jpg

http://www.trickworld.com/Galleries/rbn1.jpg

no such luck

http://www.kuci.org/~brianm/ile/ExecWheel.gif
but happy all the time and with kids and wife

What I turned out to be most of the time:
http://www.kuci.org/~brianm/ile/ExecWheel.gif
but just more angsty, no kids, no wife, much larger music collection, no suit or tie ever, with occasional breaks from the hamster wheel basking in the laziness.

So while everyone else had high ambitions of fame, fortune and space travel, I had more modest ambitions which still went unaccomplished. They're both still achievable, but to be honest I don't really want them anymore. My excuse is that I'm not a grown up yet.

http://www.gilliomville.com/todam/wedgillsmart/hoss.jpg

oh my god i'm supposed to be some kind of grown up apparently what the FUCK

mine prolly imagined I had a job right now

famous

ha

Teenage HOOS worried too much.

I saw myself as Ozzie Smith.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

employed

I am essentially unchanged: I knew I would read and write a lot, never marry, and and live alone. Hooray consistency!

i am not an int'l man of mystery :(

Not a famous writer or married - wanted to be the first, assumed I'd be the second. Am an archaeologist though, that's still cool!

I think I'm actually doing everything I would have wanted to, although I didn't imagine it would actually be feasible.

That sounded kind of smug and self-congratulatory, didn't it? I'm a douche.

No it didn't, and I think that's awesome.

It's sort of tricky to think about this in either direction: if you're exactly as you imagined you'd be then you've somehow imprisoned yourself through planning, and if you're nothing like what you imagined you'd be then you've somehow "failed" to become that thing. Neither scenario is quite right, and when you're a kid your sense of what it would mean to 'be' any particular thing at all is pretty hazy and imagistic. I remember quite clearly that from the sixth grade or so I always wanted to be the person who narrates Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", i.e. "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--" and now sure enough I've grown up to be someone who has to stay up late poring over sixteenth century texts. But I didn't imagine that a teaching position would also involve lots of paperwork and bureaucracy and hurdle-jumping that has nothing to do with the "poring over forgotten lore" part.

When I was young I was so attached to the narrative of a glamorous n goth tragic early death that survival itself was never part of my plan. But then I do remember being pretty young, like a freshman in high school or something in the mid 80s, and counting ahead to the likelihood that I would probably be in graduate school during the year 2000. And sure enough that did indeed come to pass. But most of what has happened I would never have predicted. Life has been so much better than I thought it was going to be, and I'm grateful that I stuck around to find out, because there were certainly points in my early 20s where that didn't seem likely.

I was convinced I'd be a special effects designer. Bad work, adult me.

I was going to be an AWES ballet dancer a'la Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (minus the welding), attend the FAME school where Leroy would fall madly in love with me, and write amazing novels (like the Magic Faraway Tree & Trixie Belden) in my spare time.

I may have set the bar a little high.

Yeah, perhaps the "be famous novelist by early adulthood" was a little over-ambitious.

(i thought that too!)

i always imagind myself a rock star. didn't happen.

but by the time i was a little older, i did imagine myself as a writer. which is what i am. but then again, i hardly consider myself an adult.

i wanted to be a writer since i was six, now i am an intern

My first relatively serious vision of my future self was in high school. I had just discovered NPR and I really wanted to be one of the people who get called in to talk for a few minutes, or take questions for half an hour on Talk of the Nation.

To be honest, if I ever get anyone near where I want to be as an energy advocate, I would be tickled to death to appear on NPR. So I guess I'm not there, but I'm still trying.

please do not die from tickling

still havent gotten over elmo RIP

also I made a deal with my best friend @16 that I would be writing for the Rolling Stone by the time I was 25. but I realised that Jann Wenner was a douche by the time I was 21 so I was okay not keeping up my end of the bargain. And hey, I ended up writing for A magazine. A free magazine. But a magazine nonetheless. (sob)

pretty much none of the things i thought i would have or be have come to pass really, i'm not married, don't own a house, don't work in any scientific fields. on the other hand i really wouldn't want the life i envisioned for myself, even though i am a complete loser in most ways compared to that childhood vision

i think growing up i imagined myself like really second-rate career wise, like optometry or being a band director (not that there is anything wrong with either vocation, but you don't stay up at night dreaming about that kinda shit). i liked michael jordan, but i collected way more scottie pippen cards because that was more reasonable if i wanted to amass. i liked ford mustangs. just like, not really wild shit! coulda been dreaming about being a goddamn mad scientist all driving lambos and living on a remote island.

when i was in 5th grade i wanted to write books because a school project kind of morphed into a first draft that was heavily influenced by beavis and butthead, and spaceballs, and sports. i think i threw that away in middle school due to some damn fool embarrassed notion. i continued to like writing but no longer saw myself as a novelist or anything like that, maybe doing a newspaper column. part of this history of think baout above averageness.

shit, that sounds kinda bleak, i mean also thought about being president sometimes.

i dunno, there's something pleasant and humble about envisioning an average future.

shit, that sounds kinda bleak, i mean also thought about being president sometimes.

...of the local Ham Radio fan club chapter.

sorry, sorry!

who needs to dream about reality, my friend

i have a car so i'm 100% up on this

Didn't become a rock star or an archeologist but I did go to Egypt to study with an archeologist and I also went on tour and played alot of kickass shows. I think the only objection my childhood version would have towards my current lifestyle is that I've stopped watching Ren & Stimpy.

History professor, emphasis on the American Civil War, pipe smoker, probably writes historical fiction on the side.

My child self had not a single clue what my adult self would be like. I had a sneaking idea it might involve being a writer, but I had no model to understand what that meant, so it was just as much a mystery as if I thought I'd be a leviathan.

i am not an int'l man of mystery :(

when i was little kid i got in trouble one time for wearing my nice suit when i was playing spies w/my friends - i had been using a watergun and got the jacket all wet my mom was pretty annoyed - ever since then have harbored a strange desire to become a spy

but really my childhood goal was pretty much just to be able to play nintendo whenever i wanted ~ mission accomplished

oh i guess i did think i would own a ferrari and consort w/brainy babes - this has not happened since as i matured i realized that lambos are cooler and girls have cooties

i guess to really backtrack to like 5 yr old me YOUNG HOOS would be disappointed that i am not a magician

5 year old me tried to walk through the back of my closet, and Mum found me sitting in there crying because I couldn't get to Narnia. I was pretty sure that's where I'd be when I was grownup, like Queen Lucy.

Best part: it could still happen.

When I was very young, I wanted to be a medical doctor because I thought that's what smart people do. Then I hit adolescence and wanted to be a nuclear physicist because nuclear energy is powerful and I wanted to feel powerful and still do something that you had to be smart to do. Really all I wanted to do was think hard about interesting things and talk about them with like-minded people. I have managed to pull that off. And I get addressed as "doctor" regularly so I sorta achieved my youngest dreams.

I always figured I'd have a family but never understood how I'd get from thinking girls are weird and having just male friends, to having a girl be my main friend. Eventually this happened but I still don't understand how. But my love of pop music is wrapped up with my continuing to try to figure this out.

When I was 5 I thought my future wife would be black. This is because we were living with my cousins at the time. They were girls, a year or three older than me, and definitely a corrupting influence.

At age 5 I hoped I would someday be a cool Mormon cartoonist who also dressed like Annie Hall*. At age 15 I hoped I would be a goth (but still Mormon). I think my parents had knocked being a cartoonist as A Career out of my head at this point. I sometimes wonder if my young self could see who I am today, would they be disappointed? Surprised? Scared? Happy? I am happy with who I am right now & I don't need kindergarten Abbott's approval but it occasionally enters my imagination.

*not that I'd seen Annie Hall, I just had this obsession with men's clothing

I think I am a combination of all the things I ever wanted to be in life, except for the part where I wanted to be an OB-GYN & abortion provider; haven't really done anything like that.

I thought I would have figured out what God's will for my life was, by now, and would magically have grown to understand and accept the limitations that religion was going to put on my life as a wife and mother. I tried to grok them all through childhood but it seemed impossible that I would ever be okay about the whole submission thing as all boys were stupider and grosser than me.

Ended up chucking the whole idea of religion instead; I think I came out ahead overall. Boys still stupid and gross.

Things my younger self would be impressed with if he met me:

- Wow you can draw really cool cartoons (I'm okay, but I wanted to draw cartoon strips when I was 8)
- You're a DJ (but not on the radio, oh)
- You have friends (real friends!) and a girlfriend and you're not ridiculous shy or repulsively ugly (phew!)
- You have shitloads of music

Things he wouldn't be impressed with:

- You work in a call centre and you're not an astronaut or a cartoonist or a Radio 1 DJ
- You still live in North Hertfordshire, as opposed to outer space

really little me wanted to draw comic books, but I'd abandoned that plan for the most part by the time I was a teenager. otherwise things have worked out more or less as I planned

Never wanted to be famous at all, wanted to be an architect or interior designer or archaeologist. Family obligations kept me from finishing my education but I'm not really sorry about anything.

I guess I envisioned myself as some combination of

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/4897/jacquesm.jpg

&

http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/2410/lukegw.jpg

Think I've gotten pretty close to that goal tbh

A marine or navy officer. Enlisted in marines, took a dep and chickedn out.

thank fuckin christ

As a kid I always envisioned myself as an idle playboy type, even before I knew what girls looked like under their clothes. The concept of working for a living never ever appealed to me, from my earliest days.

a young Hugh Hefner.

I saw adult me as having a big manly jaw. I'll never have a big manly jaw. :(

http://www.lypsinka.com/life/469.gif

I'm not yet a famous archaeologist, spy, great American novelist or filmmaker. Oh yeah I'm not a submarine commander either. :(

The concept of working for a living never ever appealed to me

I wanted to live like the narrator of the Pet Shop Boys song 'Left To My Own Devices'.