When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A reader. It drove my mother nuts because “you can’t make a living from reading books! And nobody will want to marry you because men are scared of women who are too smart.”
Look who was right this whole time.
Clarissa's Blog 
I wanted to be an artist.
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“what did you want to be when you grew up?”
I’m pretty sure my earliest dream job was bus driver (for some time as a child I was weirdly fascinated with how a bus could turn corners on narrow streets and spent a long time playing with toy buses and turning…. and then something else interested me and I forgot about that…
I also imagined careers as a secret agent and/or expert in the occult and or scientist (discovering alien civilizations). My family included and/or were friends with performers in rodeos and circuses so those seemed like viable options at various times as well.
Sometimes the ambitions of a five-year old don’t really indicate very much that’s useful…
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One of my relatives infamously answered this question (what do you want to be when you grow up?) with: “A tractor”
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My kids, at that age, ALL wanted to drive the trash truck, or operate an excavator.
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“wanted to drive the trash truck”
Mosquito truck sounds like much more fun… we used to follow it around on our bikes driving in the “clouds”…. maybe that explains some things…..
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My mother reports the same thing… “oh yeah, we used to chase the DDT truck around the neighborhood. Of course we’ve all had cancer!”
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I can’t say that I remember much from when I was 5 years old; much less what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Hell, I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I was 45 and decided to ride a bicycle across the United States.
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Astronaut. That was what I wanted to be at age five.
That same year I turned five was the year men first walked on the Moon, so it felt (then) very reasonable to hope that by the time I was a man myself, space travel would be common.
By the time I was 12, I’d already figured out that the U.S. was wussing out of doing any more manned space exploration. But I had no idea that we would go for 50 years after the last Moon landing (December 1972) and still not have anybody return. If you’d told me that, I’d have been horrified at the prospect of such stagnation.
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” I’d have been horrified at the prospect of such stagnation”
pt 2 “follow the failure:
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Yes, exactly. The libertarians, in particular, have been glaringly absent. There can’t be better proof that they never believed in their own theory.
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Throughout the lockdowns, people kept asking me, “But how do you know you are right? How do you know for sure?”
I had spent a lifetime reading and thinking critically, so I applied those skills. That’s how I knew. I thought for myself. And absolutely everything I said throughout COVID has now been officially confirmed to be correct.
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“I applied those skills”
I don’t know about a lifetime thinking critically (way too much pop culture trivia in my head to make that claim) but it was very clear by Easter 2020 (and even more so at the beginning of May) that covid wasn’t the plague that the media (and enablers) were screaming about and getting it myself was more of a mild inconvenience (made much worse by official isolation policy).
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“libertarians… never believed in their own theory”
Libertarianism, in its purest form is basically male adolescent rebellion against the network of restrictions and obligations that come with traditional male adulthood.
It’s unworkable and doomed but helps them blow off steam… middle-aged or older libertarians are just another form of the Peter Pan complex….
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I was really into the whole libertarian thing when I was 20ish. When I realized this same thing about basically all the male persons involved in that scene, it lost its glamour. Here you are opining about a system of non-governance that only works if everybody is being responsible Christian adults… and the whole reason you like it is because you hate rules and authority and want to do a bunch of drugs without getting arrested?
Missing an important step, there, fellas. Libertarian ideal just isn’t going to work in a “society” where all the men are juvenile arseholes smoking weed 24/7 and praying for someone to attempt a carjacking so they can experience the thrill of blowing a hole in another person with their personal artillery. And in a world where everybody’s a pot farmer, nobody’s going to be making a living at it.
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“a system of non-governance that only works if everybody is being responsible Christian adults…”
In other words it only works if everybody else behaves according to the very rules the libertarians hate…. (what you said basically but I wanted to be less subtle).
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Indeed.
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The key was realizing that 99% of dudes who self-identify as “libertarian” are also bitter about not getting laid, but lack the self-awareness to realize it’s their personal habits that ensure this.
The people on the opposite end of that bitterness scale are inevitably… devoutly religious married people.
It is almost as though rules… have something to do with life satisfaction.
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Still want to be an astronaut, tbh. I view it as proof of maturity that I now know it’d interfere with some of my other goals.
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Hmm, Arestovich would say that it’s the exact opposite. 🙂
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Do expand please, I still can’t read Arestovich 😀
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He says we betray our childhood dreams and mask this existential defeat by claiming that it’s the mature thing to do. The first step towards living an authentic life is to remember what our childhood dream was and figure out when we betrayed it. He says people usually betray their childhood dream twice. We need to remember when these two betrayals took place and how we justified them to ourselves. And then we need to give ourselves permission to go after the childhood dream. There is no laziness or procrastination (and I deeply agree with that). What we see as laziness is a reluctance to be doing what we are supposed to do and an attempt to force ourselves into things that can’t make us happy.
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That’s quite funny!
I gave up on the artist thing when I realized there weren’t any ateliers anymore, and couldn’t find anybody who taught neoclassical anything. What was the point? That’s a lot of money to pay for a degree in ugly.
And here in middle age, I am slowly, inexorably, morphing into a musician instead. Not my idea: I’m as shocked as anybody. But it’s true I don’t put off the work for it, the way I do with everything else.
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See? Nobody is too lazy to do what they really want to do. Laziness is a myth.
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“I’d have been horrified at the prospect of such stagnation”
As the song goes…. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, B-B-B-Baby, you just ain’t seen nothin’ yet”….
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But PROGRESS! Every day, in every way, we are becoming better and better, right? … Right?
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Some men ARE afraid of women who are too smart, but they’re not the kind any intelligent woman would care to have anything to do with, let alone marry.
As for my husband, once we got engaged he was pathetically eager to marry me, whether because of or despite my intelligence I couldn’t say. I wanted the wedding to be in the spring or the fall, which at that time were my two favorite seasons. I was leaning toward fall, but he kept lobbying for spring. “What’s so great about spring?” I asked, irritated at his intransigence. His reply: “It’s sooner.”
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This is actually super cute! 🙂
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