5/25/2010 What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" This question dogged me as a child. Grownups always ask it. I never knew. For a while, I said "circus performer" because I liked the sparkly costumes and gymnastics feats. However, though I was hardly a wise or poignant child, somehow I knew I had no future as an athlete. (In fact, I really had absolutely no idea what I'd do with myself until almost my senior year in college.)

It's fun posing the same question to kids, though a piece of me recalls my own discomfort at being asked to make a career choice when I was mostly concerned with my next playdate (though we didn't call them playdates back then).

But alas, the sweet old days of "fireman" and "policeman" are past around here. It's not even that Gabriel has chosen a career path at this point, it's more like it's chosen him. Kids go through phases and change their minds (after all I'm no trapeze artist), but it's very very hard to imagine at this point that this 8-year-old -- my little boy who still sleeps with a teddy bear -- won't become an electrical engineer.


This is what he's holding up in the video. He produces 1 or 2 of these a day.



I'm not dooming him to the engineer's life, and I'll certainly encourage him to explore alternatives. And even if he does go the engineer route, I'll nurture other interests too, especially to help him facilitate a social life when he's older. I know many an engineer motorcyclist who lamented their inability to meet women within their primary interests -- in fact, I married one! But if wanted to knock him off this track, it'd be futile. I might just as well try to get his hair to lay flat.

5/25/2010