the longest road out

Sometimes you leave an academic advising appointment and then have your future all figured out.

Sometimes you leave an academic advising appointment and your adviser then has Facebook messages and Twitter all figured out.

Next time, maybe I can explain Tumblr.

…is the authors’ choice to include Scott Peterson and OJ Simpson in the section titled “White Collar Crime.”

Eh.  White collar, wife killer.  I mean, they SOUND kind of the same.  It works.

Yesterday, in New Orleans’ Jackson Square, while my friend Ally was getting a henna tattoo from a lady with purple hair and matching eyebrows, I struck up a conversation with this guy.

I promised him I wouldn’t text while driving, and then he gave me a free painting.

So now I have this.

It’s a question that I haven’t heard in a while, at least not phrased in that way.

At this point “the future” is more of a gray cloud of uncertainty, hanging overhead and showering us all with panic about choosing the right career paths, moving towards financial security—on top of finishing out the semester with decent grades and lining up summer internships.

There’s none of that promise, that magic, that hope, there was when we were 5 years old and wanted to be ballerinas, firefighters and astronauts.

Something about the context of the question prompted me to think about it on those terms again, through the optimistic eyes of a kindergartner.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Not “What are you planning to do after graduation?”; not “But do you think you’ll be able to find a job in that field?”; not “That doesn’t pay very well, does it?” — a question about dreams, not about plans.

I am proud to say I still have the same basic aspirations I did when the biggest worry in my day was how to color in skin tone armed with only a box of Crayola markers.

I still want to write.

I still want to change the world.

And I don’t see why I can’t.