What I wanna be when I grow up.

When I was a little kid, people would ask of my classmates and I what we wanted to be when we grew up. They would respond in the way that most people would expect: veterinarian, nurse, fireman, astronaut, basketball star. Nobody ever said "When I grow up, I wanna be a junkie." Hahahahaha! Remember that lame-ass commercial series? The best was the ballerina who collapsed while doing her pirouette, or whatever the hell that was, with her eyes rolled back in her head, in slow motion with that vaguely Friday the 13th-esque music: ch ch ch ch AH AH AH AH AH.

Anyway, they'd get to me pretty close to last (usually this line of questioning came from our pastor as he read our report cards and handed them out, commenting limply about our performance) because of my last name. When Father Xxxxxx got to my name once, he asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. Without missing a beat, he added dryly "Well, looks like a doctor here." No, it wasn't my science grades (which were always high) or my math grades (which were distinctly not), but my penmanship grades. I have serial-killer notes-pinned-on-a-rapidly-cooling-corpse handwriting, and I embrace that. He thought that was a gas and he slapped his pale white sacristy-living thigh. I looked at him and I said that I wanted to become a scholar of Turkish culture and language and then I sat down.

No, that's not what I said at all. What I said was that I wanted to be a cryptozoologist. He looked at me like I had just defiled a statue of the Virgin Mary with yak feces. "What?", he asked, his glasses pulled down over his nose in a "don't fuss with me or when I have you alone in the annex I'll..." kind of look. I explained that cryptozoologists study animals that live beyond ordinary biology. You know, like the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, Bob Saget, you get the point. He put my report card down on his bony lap and looked at me with the kind of pitying look you reserve for when you see frat boys picking nits out of each other's hair. He shook his head and said, "Bitch, you gonna die hungry, mmm-hmm." No, what he said was that, perhaps, I was being hasty. I said that I would think long and hard about what I really wanted to be and sat down with my report card vowing all the way that I would become a cryptozoologist just to piss him off. Yes, that's the day I began my long road to Hell, but I would be damned if someone was going to tell me I couldn't do something, even if he WAS married to the Big J.C.

When I was in high school, I became infatuated with the idea of becoming a marine biologist. I took SCUBA lessons, I listened to "Ay, Calypso" by Bob Denver a lot and began to wear a funny red winter hat and started smoke a pipe and speak with an officious French accent. Then, I found out that Jacques Cousteau's boats went down more than a truck stop whore on smack and that most marine biologists study such stultifyingly boring crap--like plankton, diatoms, marine worms--and the magic went away. Then I went to Italy and Greece, and there, standing on the Acropolis in Athens in the shadow of the Parthenon, I realized that I wanted to study the weirdest thing of all: people. I went on in college to take dozens and dozens of really really bizarre classes in anthropology, my beloved field of study. Yet, when I looked at my transcript the other day from my UMaine years, I noticed that I had taken an aquaculture class my first semester. Subconsciously I had thought that maybe I wanted to check it out, just to make sure that I really didn't want to inseminate sea urchins until my arthritic hands broke into bleeding shards. Aquaculture, by the way, is farming aquatic/marine life for food and use. You all have eaten "farm-raised" salmon, tilapia, catfish, shrimp, or crawfish before, surely. That's where they come from.

As I pause at the threshold of the end of my time here at IU (doing my MA, at least), I am confronted by a dizzying array of options that I had scarcely imagined. Will I stay here and work in my new love, foreign student advising? Will I go on for that Ph.D? If so, in what? Will I buy that one-way ticket to Turkey? Or will I go home and live my life in Maine with that special someone? In my mind, I know the answer. I know which one is the winner, Vanna.

You'll all just have to wait and see.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom