Tag Archives: life’s unexpected joys and disappointments

Never in my wildest dreams…

Posted on by XUP

Part of wallowing in nostalgia these last few days has been being surprised at how different everyone’s life turned out.  Once we were all young, idealistic, narcissistic, artistes. We were fun. We were ready to take on the world and make it a better place. We had aspirations. We had dreams. We knew EVERYTHING!

Now we’re all old. Most of us work in mundane, non-art-related jobs. We’re parents, drive SUVs, live in the suburbs. And, interestingly, we’re all pretty happy with our lives.

If you’re under 30, you won’t know what I’m talking about because you still have a whole list of stuff you KNOW you’re going to do with your life.

If you’re over 30, maybe you are exactly where you always wanted to be, but maybe your life has taken a few unexpected twists and turns along the way. 

So, (and I saw something similar someone else’s blog recently, and I’m sorry I can’t remember which one)  finish this sentence: When I was very young, I never in my wildest dreams thought I would…

My answers:

  • Spend my life working in a government office
  • Be this boring (what happened to that artsy commune we were going to form?)
  • Be this poor (doesn’t every young person believe they will be famous and/or a millionaire as an adult? I’m not sure how “commune” and “millionaire” were supposed to reconcile, but they did in my youthful, yetfeeble mind)
  • Get so much joy (and paranoia) from being a parent (growing up the oldest of5 withmuch younger siblings kind of put me off the wholeidea of babysitting for the rest of my life – who knew?)
  • Be lucky enough to get a good kid (my mother always cursed me with, “I hope you end up with a daughter just like you! I totally believed here and was fully prepared for a monster.)
  • Own a computer (when I was a kid, a computer was 12 feet high, took up an entire room, cost billions of dollars and processed data using punch cards, whirring spools as big as your head and a team of highly-trained technology geeks. Also, in the movies, The Computer always ended up taking over the world)