I’ve got a bit of a cough and some general achiness going on right now, so I am spending the evening curled up on the couch with Miss Jackson watching television and being completely unproductive. I think I am about to set a record for the number of times a person can check their email and facebook in one hour. So, to change it up a bit, I decided to blog.
With this strike going on and continuing through this weekend at the very least, the threat of me being temporarily out of work until it’s over has been on my mind. So, naturally, I’ve been trying to think of things I could do to make some money during that period of time should it end up happening. And I’m coming up empty.
It got me thinking about when I was younger, and how I had a new dream job every other week. There was always something new I wanted to be, and I threw myself into each of them wholeheartedly. For that week.
I remember there was one period of time during my childhood when I wanted to be a cashier at a grocery store. That was mostly because I thought the scanner was probably the most amazing thing in the world and to get to use it all day long at work was about the most fulfilling thing I could imagine at that age. Coupled with the fact that a cash register also seemed like an incredibly exciting machine (toy), there was no doubt in my mind that the only thing I wanted to be as an adult was a cashier.
Then I moved on from that pipe dream and decided it would be better to be a bag boy at the grocery store. How exciting to take the food people bought, put it into bags systematically, and then carry them out to their car for them. Now THAT was a dream job.
That is, it WAS a dream job until telephone operator came along. And not just any telephone operator, but the kind from the earlier days of telephone where people told you who they wanted to talk to you and you would take some sort of plug thing and put it into a slot and manually connect them. I wanted to sit at my telephone operator desk and plug and unplug people all day long. A wall of sockets in front of me with cables tangled around each other. It looked like a complete mess to everyone else, but to me, I would know what each cable was and what it was doing there. The simple fact that that job didn’t even exist anymore was not enough to deter me in my desire to be a telephone operator. It was destined to be…
Until the day I decided to it would be much more fun to be a ventriloquist. I even went so far as to have Mom buy a ventriloquist dummy from the JC Penney catalog for me. His name was Lester. He came with a small record (yes, a record) that gave you a very basic lesson in how to be a master ventriloquist. After practicing for about five hours straight, it became clear that I was not cut out to be a world famous ventriloquist. Lester and I broke up and went our separate ways.
Then it was onto being a magician. I was obsessed with magic as a child and had tons of magic books and those little magic kits. They all had the exact same tricks in them, but I had to get each and every one I found. And everyone summer I would go to Adventureland for my birthday, and one of the performers there was a magician. I would always go see his show each time I was there. One year when I was about 10, he pulled me up on stage to be his assistant, even giving me an actual magician’s name. I was Nick, the Halfway Decent. I was so proud. I remember he had me hypnotize a young lady he had also pulled out of the audience (after trying to set me up on a date with her. Sorry, dude, never gonna happen), and then I made her levitate. I thought I was the shit. I mean, come on, I was Nick, the Halfway Decent. That’s a pretty big deal.
The whole magic obsession lasted much longer than all the other passing whims I had, and to some degree, still lingers with me. I have a great appreciation for magicians and while I no longer have a desire to be one, perhaps it wouldn’t be too shabby of an idea to be a magician’s assistant and spend my days appearing and disappearing from boxes, getting impaled with swords, and tossing my hair while a giant wind machine blows across the stage.
Do any magicians have male assistants? I’m gonna have to look into that.
Those were some of my aspirations as a child. I didn’t accomplish a single one. But that’s ok. Because even though I may not be a world famous cashier, or an accomplished telephone operator, or a highly respected ventriloquist, there is something that can never be taken away from me.
I am, and always will be… Nick, the Halfway Decent.