Wisdom

You know, as I sit here at a job I never anticipated in my younger years, I ponder what people once told me. You see, I wanted to write music. Specifically (at the time), musicals. That was my goal. And I could do it. I was always asked, though, what my fall back plan was, and I always replied that I didn't need one because I would succeed. Here I sit almost twenty years later still not having succeeded, and I note that they asked me the wrong question. They always worded the question like "when you fail, then what?" You can't tell someone with determination that they'll fail. It's uncool. The angle should have been, "what do you want to do while you're working toward that goal?" or even "what will you do to make enough money to pay for that goal before they pay you?"

What I'm faced with in reaching this goal now is the monetary side of it. I can succeed if I have enough time and money to throw at it, but I honestly make enough to pay the bills. That's it. If I had planned my life out better, I would have gone for a psychiatry doctorate, worked as a psychiatrist during the day (hey, a head shrinker sounds like fun), and then by night, I would have had the excess scratch to pursue what I want to do. It would pay better than what I do now anyway.

We've passed this wisdom on. Rock Girl said when she was little that she wants to be an astronaut. We encouraged this, and now when she's about to hit high school, we're digging deeper to find out what she would do as an astronaut. After all, people go into space for a specific reason, so she would have to specialize in some field of science to be necessary on a space mission. She actually loves astrophysics. So we're taking the angle of while you're not in space, what job would you like to do that will make you happy and give you the skills to go into space, should the opportunity arise (since the space program is currently floating at the top of the toilet waiting for the guv'ment to pull the handle). She has embraced this willingly.

So it's sort of a matter of living my life vicariously through my children, but if she achieves her goals and lives an even better life than I did, then I believe I can say we've done well.