104) What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up

I work in Media, which is to say I spend a lot of time with spreadsheets and numbers analyzing budgets and making decisions for clients based on efficiency and value.  It is a nice career with a good balance between figuring out puzzles and creatively presenting ideas I have to sell in recommendations I ask our clients to make with their money.  I like it and would endorse it as a good career choice to young people.  However, I have never once heard a young child say, "When I grow up, I want to plan media!"

As a fun exercise, I will spend some time sharing some of things I remember wanting to be when I grew up.  

• The earliest thing I remember was wanting to be a lawyer so that I could have a desk in Joe's office and go to work with him everyday.  I must have been 4-5 years old and would go with Joe to his office on Saturdays.  The buildings downtown (and the elevator ride) amazed me and I played with a box full of hot wheels next to a window in a conference room.  Each Saturday we walked to a dingy James Coney Island for 2 hot dogs with mustard and ketchup.  One time, I was going to the bathroom (#2) in a 1 person bathroom.  The door had no lock so Joe guarded for me.  This large black dude pushed his way past Joe and barged into the bathroom repeating, "I gotta take a piss...I gotta take a piss".  He whipped his thing out and pissed in the sink right in front of me, with Joe standing in the doorway unsure of what was the appropriate response.  To this day, I have not gone back to the bathroom in a James Coney Island.
• Soon afterward I wanted to be a professional baseball player.  We went to Astros games all the time and I used to practice fake pitching at the top of the ramps leading to the seats.  At the end of the game I would sprint down the ramps as fast as I could, and one time I got to the bottom and could not find Joe or my mom.  I cried until a police officer stood with me and helped me find them.  I suppose that was when it was obvious I would not cut it as a pro ball player, because as everyone knows, "there's no crying in baseball."
• My fourth grade summer I discovered stand up comedy.  Watched it all the time!  I remember comic relief, George Carlin, Robin Williams, Robert Townsend, Sam Kinison, Bob Nelson, Andrew Dice Clay and Steven Wright and thinking to myself how much I wanted to be a stand up comedian.  Sometimes I think of something funny and decide that it would be good material for my first stand up routine.  I wonder when that will be...
• In Junior High, I did not think about my future much.  At least, not as much as I did in elementary school.  The only thing I remember about Junior High is I went through a short period of time where I wanted to be a pediatrician.  I liked the idea of making children feel better, and with Stephen and Cody, I had a lot of experience messing with young children.  Not sure what dissuaded me from this, as I still think I would be a good pediatrician.  Probably all of the school and stuff, and the fact that I would not have been able to party as much in college.  
• In high school, I came to the realization I wanted to be a teacher.  This lasted throughout out all of high school and well into my first semester at college.  I remember Kunio telling me many times how teachers don't make much money.  I would always tell him that money is not everything.  "You won't be saying that when you don't have any," he would tell me.  Incidentally, it was not the money that turned me off of teaching.  It was the mandatory class observations I experienced at a local high school through my first semester at Baylor.  I observed a geography class, and watching the teacher beat his head against the wall that is high school attention deficit disorder made me realize that I could not be a teacher at all.  I decided I wanted to be a professor.
• There was a small amount of time where I considered the military.  I went to a recruiting office and took the test used to determine what track you would take once you entered.  I scored well on this test and was going to go into the Marines with the hope of being an officer.  The main reason I considered this was the fact they pay for your college.  It would take a few years to earn this, but I felt like a few years in return for a free education was a worthy trade.  I remember the day I went to the recruiting office to sign the paper work I thought about what the actual trade was.  I was not trading a few years of my life.  Instead, I was trading my friends for a free education.  I considered the possibility that joining the military would mean I would go to school 4 years after Chris, Craig, Dugat etc.  and that was NOT a worthy trade to me.  So happy I made that decision...because like I told Kunio early on, money is not everything.
• In college, I wanted to be a writer!  I started off by writing a couple of short stories (one of them had imaginary talking puppets in it) followed by my first attempt at writing a novel.  I got more than 100 pages in and my computer crashed.  I was able to save the files, but paranoia drove me to write the rest of the novel by hand.  Since then I have written a handful of novels and a handful of unfinished novels.  Writing as a career is much too emotionally stressful, and is no way to spend a lifetime...even though I have some good stories stuck in my head just begging to get out.
• After graduating I took a job at a trade show booth company.  I spent much of my time there seeking out other opportunities.  Among these was opening a bar.  L. bought me several books on how to open a bar and we started trying to figure out what it would take to get the ball rolling.  Of course, there were two main hurdles to overcome.  The first was getting a business loan, which is not an easy thing to do.  The second was getting a liquor license, also not an easy thing to do.  Ultimately, the plan was destined to fail because nothing good could come from me being at a bar every night.
• Finally, upon moving back to Dallas I spent a couple of months with no job.  Being unemployed was difficult for me.  My life had little structure and I had little to no self worth.  I woke up early with L.  every morning to see her off to work and to get my day started.  I spent my time trying to work out, swim, apply for jobs and watching DVRed Rangers games.  And I also spent time putting together a business plan for a boxing gym.  I wanted to open a boxing gym near a college campus, where you would have a never ending influx of new customers trying to stay in shape.  I feel like working out is important for health and confidence, and what better way to spend your working hours than working out and helping others work out.  Makes a lot of sense.  Again, the problem arose of getting a business loan.