those dying dreams

When you get older, and we are all getting older, you start to take stock of your life and what you have/have not accomplished. Lucky for me, a lot of the dreams I've had over the year have died of natural causes before I got too much chance to try and fail to achieve them. Here are some highlights:

Become a successful children's book author
I wrote constantly when I was a kid. I had an overactive imagination and always made up stories and as soon as I could write, I started putting them down on paper. Obviously, I still do write often, so this dream isn't too far off. Until you read the stuff I've written in the past few years. I've developed a distinct style that involves a lot of profanity, drug references, and dark humor. So unless kids think death is as funny as I seem to think or there's a market for "Baby's First F-Bomb" type kid lit, I'm probably not the next superstar of pre-adolescents.

Marry a Greek boy
I wanted this before "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." Greek people are awesome. In high school, I knew this Greek kid...well, I didn't really know him, he was a friend of a friend's boyfriend, but I knew him enough that I tagged along to his graduation party. As with most open houses, the food is the real draw, so our first stop was the buffet. I sort of poked around the weird looking Greek stuff until the grad's grandpa came over and snatched the paper plate from my hands. "You want some of this?" he asked, scooping a giant spoonful of something I couldn't pronounce if I tried. "Uh, no thanks," I replied, except he had already plopped it on my plate. "You eat it. You like it. It's Greek" and we repeated that routine until my plate was buckling under a massive pile of Greek weirdness. Well, that weirdness turned out to be delicious and even though I had to throw about half of it away (I weight 110 pounds at the most back then. Where was I going to put it all?) I've got mad love for any culture who loves food that much. Also, Greek people are really loud. I decided I wanted to be Greek. Unfortunately, the grad was the only Greek kid I knew (and I think he's gay...Elaine, is he gay now? Seems like we decided he was) and I haven't met any since. So, I guess this dream doesn't really have to die, I just have to figure out where Greek people hang out.

Fall in love with Jonathon Taylor Thomas/Ben Affleck/Travis Barker
Trav got a little too ghetto fabulous for me, Ben got married to Jennifer Garner, and I'm pretty sure JTT is gay. Whatever, Shia LaBeouf and I are very, very happy.

Be the first woman in the NBA
I don't think too many people realize how much I love basketball and even fewer know how much I obsessed over basketball in my pre-teen years. I literally spent hours watching, playing, or talking about basketball. I could rattle off stats for Seattle's starting lineup and most of the bench (the Sonics were my team), plus I could school yo' ass on the court, so while most girls were starting to daydream about the cute boy in math class, I was daydreaming about setting up plays and alley-ooping to Shawn Kemp. Yeah, I was that good. In my head. Then the WNBA came along and killed that dream. You would think a professional women's league would have been the dream come true, but I didn't want to be one of the hundreds of women in a league, I wanted to be the woman in the league. No one becomes a folk hero for doing want a billion other ladies can do. Soon after I begrudgingly decided to be a superstar of the stupid WNBA, and for a myriad of reasons I don't entirely remember, I quit playing basketball. The last time I remember picking up a ball was about 4 or 5 years ago when I used to play with some Japanese guys in Ryder (Asian folks are obnoxiously polite. These dudes would apologize after stealing the ball or scoring on someone. Takes a lot of the fun out of trash talk). I've haven't even watched any b-ball lately, maybe 5 or 6 games in the past year. And when I do catch a game, I get this feeling of guilt, like running into an old friend you haven't bothered to call since the last time you randomly met up.


Be a rock star
This dream has been the hardest to let go. I love music more than anything, but my attempts to make a career out of that feeling have been consistently disappointing. My high school "band", The Seemonkies, is legendary, but never really went anywhere. I had a guitar that I swear I tried to play, but the only songs I learned were "Maggie May" and one Jewel song. I've overcompensated for my failures by falling madly in crush with any boy I see playing guitar/bass/drums/ukulele, etc. etc. Those have also been consistently disappointing. I guess I could have gone the route of music journalism, or management or something like that, but being so close yet so far seems like it'd be even worse.

It's weird to think how things you might have wanted so badly at one point seem completely ridiculous now. Weird and depressing, but sort of puts a few things in perspective, like looking at photographs of yourself with really bad hair.

Anyone out there have any nutball dreams to share? Or photos of yourself with really bad hair?