The first things i remember wanting to be was a highwayman or a traitor of some sort, because i liked the word. That was up until about age 10, when i decided i wanted to play basketball. Then i wasn't very good at basketball, so i wanted to be a pilot. Now i'd be content making a measly amount of money doing something with music, or perhaps work for some charitable cause.

If i could go back in time and open up the full range of careers i'd aspire to be a tennis player or a dancer.

I'm all seriousness, what I want to be when I grow up is a university lecturer. The problem is that I've been a grownup for quite some time now - I'm thirty four years old (minus a few days) and I'm still at the very least two years away from having the qualification I need to even start my career. With the benefit of hindsight I should have started on this path many, many years before I did. On the other hand, I'm really chuffed to have found something that I actually want to do with my life, because for a very, very long time I simply assumed that I would never fix on a desirable and achievable goal, and that it was my fault for being a lazy bastard that therefore deserved nothing better than to drift about smoking weed and doing very poorly paid, achingly boring jobs to sustain said weed smoking.

There's also always the fact this that I can quite justly console myself with the notion that it is extremely unlikely that, had I followed a more sensible path, I would have met most of the people in my life that I care most about and have most deeply formed me as a person. Yossarian is an exception to this as we've known each other since we were seventeen or so, but almost every other one of my favourite people (family excluded of course) I just would never have crossed paths with if I hadn't dropped out of academia during my first attempt the engage with it. This includes my girlfriend, who wouldn't have met me if she hadn't also been an academic dropout at one point (actually a couple of points in fact).

Wow, sorry, that was all a bit soppy. Quite true though.

equinox_code wrote:

If i could go back in time and open up the full range of careers i'd aspire to be a tennis player or a dancer.

Strangely, you actually look like a tennis player. Maybe it's the whites. You also look like a dancer now you come to mention it.

Fair play, it does sound badass.