What Did I Want To Be When I Grew Up?
and why i quit each
Let’s get to know each other, shall we? We can do that in my favorite format — an entirely one-sided blog post where I talk ad nauseum and you don’t interrupt me even once!
Stumpies, this week I think I should get a little retrospective. Why? I don’t know… maybe because spring is around the corner, maybe because this beautiful season of rebirth and vitality inspires me to think about the past that got us here. Or, if you’re familiar with the setups to my little jokes, you’ll know it’s none of those reasons whatsoever and instead this post was borne from a two-hour long brainstorming session with the editor, punctuated in the middle by a midnight pigs in a blanket-making session. You should be very grateful I’m rolling with this concept and not some of our other pitches, such as: “why water with lemon is nice” or “a history of the Ottoman Empire, but the characters are all replaced with sports mascots” [listen, i know some of u history geeks are going to say i should have done that one, but i 1) know nothing about the ottoman empire and 2) have no intent to learn anything about the ottoman empire].
Anyway…. so let’s get to know each other me a little better on The Stump today. I think a good window into Me would be for me to tell you where I thought I was going in life before I ended up where I am. Where am I? That’s not particularly important to the story. But allow me to tell you about my paths not taken, my alternative timelines. To get to the bottom of Whatever This Is, let’s talk about all of my answers I’ve ever had to the question of:
What do you want to be when you grow up, tiny Katie?
1) A Door
Let me start off by saying that I pinky promise I am not bullshitting you with this one, and I can think of at least four people who would definitely corroborate that, as a very small child, I would tell people that I wanted to be a door when I grew up. Now, it would be very easy to dismiss this as a case of a child not understanding the question. After all, from my understanding of the situation, children are idiots who hardly know anything about anything. Go ahead, ask your toddler about their philosophy on subprime mortgage-backed securities. I bet they won’t even remember the difference between the Basel II and Basel III regulatory standards off the top of their head. Maybe with a little refresher, but certainly lacking nuance.
Point is, we know kids are morons. That being said, I really don’t think little Katie was coming from a place of stupidity when she said she wanted to be a door [i really grew into my stupidity as time went on]. I think, if I had to guess what was going through my head, it was a beautiful and thoughtful metaphor. I think I wanted to be a door in the sense that I wanted to be welcoming to many a person, but also keep those people safe once they arrived. A threshold to a cozy home for the downtrodden. Perhaps, I wanted to have the policy of “my door is always open,” but professionally. A sanctuary, a source of comfort, a gateway to safety for many. Unencumbered by my still-developing stupidity, I transcended the question altogether. I did not want to be a “singer” or an “astronaut,” no. I understood that the job itself was irrelevant! What mattered was upholding my principles.
What genius was lost in that child, what a theft of intelligence that might have bettered mankind. I blame the time I took a rock straight to the noggin’. My IQ poured out of me along with So Much Head Blood.
2) A kemist
Ah, there it is… the stupidity is starting to kick in. The next job I wanted as a child was a “kemist” [many kudos to the elementary teachers i tortured with that spelling]. One of my prized possessions as a child was my test tube set, with which I would do kemistry. In practice, this meant that my mom would fill me little bowls of water and color them with food dye, and then I would use an eyedropper to mix “potions” in my test tubes. My most revolutionary creation was what I called “Green Potion,” and its special effect was to turn you into a frog. Dear Big Pharma, I’m still sitting on that formula, just waiting for a buyer!
This all very much compounded when I began reading the Harry Potter series and developed a massive crush on Snape became intrigued by potions class. I believe I recall getting a Harry Potter themed science kit for Christmas once, which I used to make an extraordinarily-disgusting-yet-allegedly-edible-goo. There is a chance it wasn’t edible, but we can never know for sure.
Then came the fateful day… as I finished playing with my test tubes one afternoon, I diligently sat them on the bottom of the stairs as instructed by my mother. One of us would take them up on our next trip, so this was a perfectly logical plan. Until The Incident. In one of my possibly oldest grudges, my test tubes were cruelly RIPPED from me by my brother’s friend. Like the oafish teenage boys they were, my brother and his friends barreled down the stairs with absolutely no regard for any test tubes that were liable to be resting there. Lo and behold, my brother’s friend smashed right into those suckers. CRASH!!!!
My test tubes were no more, and with their death went my future career as a kemist.
3) Air Force pilot
Listen, this one was just a response to watching a slideshow of soldiers coming home photos set to “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty at a way too young of an age. Derailed extremely quickly by the fact that 1) my eyesight isn’t that good, 2) I don’t particularly like flying, and 3) I have “““issues with authority””” that I understand may not be welcome in the military.
4) Quantum physicist
I really feel I was cooking with this one, and if I had any mettle in my body this would probably be my current gig.
My mom gets credit again for fostering this one [thanks, mom! she does read the blog, but has mentioned several times now that she does not read it particularly frequently. honestly, we stan she’s definitely gotten a high enough dose of me for a lifetime]. She bought a book called “Alice in Quantumland,” and I was in an era of boredom where I was just reading books around the house/whatever was free on the Nook [dated reference alert!]. This book blew my goddamned mind. It’s a solid introduction to the topic told through an allegoric version of Alice in Wonderland. I’m sure you caught that from the title, but I figured I would type it out anyway as the benevolent lady I am.
I carried a copy of that book to school in my backpack for roughly two entire grades. I consumed as many episodes of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman as I could to satiate my curiosity. I reread Flatland approximately 16 times, which was a deeply concerning amount for a teenager. To this day I still consider myself the smallest of a dabbler in the realm of quantum physics [that was a very droll joke please laugh], but solely as a hobbyist, I assure you. In other words, don’t ask me any questions; I don’t have any answers. Which, in a way, makes me a proper quantum physicist.
But, like the other careers that came before it, this one met a cruel end. You see, I loaned my copy of Alice in Quantumland to a friend during freshman year of high school. And Stumpies, I never did get that book back. Somewhere on Alex’s bookshelf sits MY copy [mom’s copy] of Alice in Quantumland, longing for its rightful owner. Without the guiding light of my beloved book, how I could I have been expected to pursue quantum physics as a career? I see no way to surmount such a challenge.
5) Biomedical engineer
If I was a betting woman, I’d bet this is what certain people *hoped* I would do. Simply put, biomedical engineering is:
real skills + math + medicine + good pay + lots of jobs + job security
real skills + math = difficult
medicine = moral
good pay + lots of jobs + job security = wise
difficult+ moral + wise = respectable
therefore, biomedical engineering = respectable
Wonderful. However, I argue that this answer to the question of what I want to be when I grow up was certainly just a product of being old enough to understand that you can’t be a door or a quantum physicist… nooooooo…. you have to get a Real Job and be Prudent. Disrespectfully, it’s the smart kids’ answer that is just slightly more niche than other smart kids’ answers (e.g., doctor, lawyer, etc.), and its purpose is to show that you’re smarter than the other smart kids because you know jobs outside of what one might find in a children’s book. I mean biomedical engineer just sounds so smart! You can’t possibly be dumb and sixteen years old if you want to be that!
But the fundamental problem with that career track is that it sounds dreadfully boring and time consuming, frankly. To any biomedical engineers reading this, first of all, why? Second, thank you for doing your job so that I don’t have to! And you’re so totally smarter than the smart kids.
6) Psychiatrist (hey baby i hear the blues are callin’)
Ha. Hahaha. Ha Ha. Imagine — you are in the throes of immense suffering and sadness. You need help. You turn to professional assistance for your troubles. You walk into the office, desperately seeking relief. And there’s just some asshole sitting there being vaguely uncomfortable that you’re having an emotion in my direction. That’s me; I’m the asshole.
Really, this one was quite funny in retrospect. I am 300% positive this was inspired by watching A Lot of Frasier. Again, thank you, mom!
I genuinely almost went down this path… I entered college on the pre-med track and promptly dropped that shit 1-month later. We should all be thankful for that, really. There were a number of barriers to me in this profession… I don’t like blood; I require an above-average amount of sleep; I think anatomy is dull; I believe the answer to 98% of problems is ignoring them… you get it.
Maybe if this was 1996 and all I had to do was live in a posh apartment and tell people their problems were the result of an under-developed superego [an s-tier insult, should you ever need it], I could’ve had a career in this field. I mean hey, I love gossip. A little drama, a soupçon of messiness. But if you want me to memorize neurotransmitters and talk to pharmaceutical companies, we’re back to biomedical engineering, to which I say: yawn!
So, where did we end up?
None of your business! I love you, Stumpies, but I really do love you too much to bore you with my current state of affairs. Given all my yammering about certain professions being boring, I assume the vast, vast majority of you would not agree that I came out ahead in that regard.
But, we possibly learned some important lessons from this little exercise. Cue “The Long and Winding Road” by The Beatles. I discovered that my mom did a real nice job exposing me to a truly bizarre set of interests throughout my life, which utterly delights me. Take this as a sign to make sure your 10-year-old has seen both the entire Doris Day-Rock Hudson collection and A Clockwork Orange by now [i decline to comment on whether this is inspired by real events].
I also learned that minor setbacks clearly derail me like a pebble on a train track. Positively nothing was stopping me from requesting new test tubes or a new copy of Alice in Quantumland, but I pretty much took their loss as instantaneous signs to give up on that career path entirely. I have no normative comments on that fact about myself other than to say you all should be very careful not to break my metaphorical test tubes at this stage of life, as I am running out of ideas for careers if this one has to be scrapped.
Lastly, I learned that I was probably my wisest and purest self when all I wanted to be when I grew up was a humble door. With love, Stumpies, I am not planning to let any of you into my real home; however, in the spirit of a door, I intend to make sure that The Stump is a beacon of hospitality for you all… please, enter The Stump, hang out for a while, and be sure to come back again soon. You can even tell a friend! Here at The Stump, my door’s always open. Unless there’s an eviction notice taped to my forehead… then you should get lost.
Alright I talked enough, now you talk:
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Sub-question 1: Which career choice would have most disappointed your parents?
Sub-question 2: Which career choice would have least disappointed your parents but probably left you a husk of a human?
How many rocks were you hit on the head with as a child?
Who wants to sponsor me Renaissance-style to just dabble in my various interests and oddities instead of having a real job? I vow to produce nothing but will have a right-good time.
What The Stump is Reading:
- Wrote one of my favorite blog posts of all time, and it feels vaguely topical
you can give to the test tube and Alice in Quantumland replacement fund:
Respectfully I disagree with your self analysis re: door. I think little Katie just liked doors a whole lot.
I wanted to be an eccentric billionaire.
A problem with authority eh.. I’ll drink to that. Unless somebody’s telling me to, in which case screw them I AINT DRINKIN NUTHIN