Children are constantly asked what they want to be when they grow up, and it seems as if they always have an answer. Everything seems possible. Some kids want dream jobs — baseball player, president of the United States or movie star. Some want jobs that seem more glamorous than they are — pilot, doctor or teacher.
And then there are kids who say they want to be garbage collectors. Maybe those kids don’t know how to dream big. Perhaps they just like garbage. But at least they probably won’t be disappointed when they eventually grow up.
I used to tell people I wanted to be a baseball player. I knew it wasn’t realistic, but you have to have an answer to the question, and I certainly wouldn’t have minded playing baseball and making absurd amounts of money for the rest of my life. But I didn’t really know what I wanted to be.
It’s still difficult to choose what I want to be when I grow up. Because I’m studying journalism, I could be headed for a job that doesn’t even exist yet.
Realistically, I’ll end up a grumpy high-school English teacher with a half-written novel, but since when have I taken realism into account in this column?
That’s the exciting part. Since I’m still in school, I can pretend I really can be anything I want to be. I could walk on to the Bobcat baseball squad, make the team and end up in the MLB draft. I could decide to quit writing anything at all and become a hand model. I could start studying electrical engineering and become the next big name in renewable energy.
I know none of those things is going to happen, so don’t email me about how I would never in a million years beat Jensen Painter in a footrace. That doesn’t stop me from thinking about them, since I still don’t know what I want to be when I finally do grow up.
Maybe I’ll be an entrepreneur. I do have a lot of business ideas that will never work, all of which already have terrible names. Would you go to a pizza shop on the top floor of a building where all the pie is supreme and it’s thrown out the window to the customers (because it would “rain supreme”)? Or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-themed milkshake delivery service that was later amended to include soup (called “Souper Stake and Shake”)?
I wish I had the nerve to get out and start something new. Or to tell the guys who run the “A-Town Pies and Fries” food buggy that I would rather they served dessert pies than pizza. To drop out of school and start a company. To have enough faith in my ideas to put everything into them.
Kids always know what they want. Instead, I just wander around, ruminating on things I’ll never do.
Joe Fox is a junior studying online journalism and a columnist for The Post. Email him at jf250509@ohiou.edu.
