The road taken and the road totally ignored
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Thats's what I've been asking all my little cousins every time I see them. My little cousins as I've come to call them are various boys and girls (mostly girls) who've when they were younger (around 5-10 yrs old) would annoy the hell out of me. It was all in good fun. But now, I'm not sure what they want to be when they
grow up.
Do they want to go into
advertising? I hope not.
But now they are all growing up. Fast. One cousin is in grad school, ywo others go to college, countless others are on their way to high school and a few more are going through grades like a pair of socks. I'm not sure what they want to do when they grow up. My "little" cousins (10 of them all together) to me are my representation of American youth. They are typical teenagers, some adolescents and kids. They are Generation Y. I hate classiying them but I can't help it. If you were born after 1980, you've been tagged as Y. These are the kids who grew and are growing up on the Internet, MTV, reality shows, uber pop singers, eminem and post 9/11.
And so when I see my cousins, I'm not sure where they're headed. I have a family instinct to guide them, teach them, counsel them. Yet they don't want to listen.
When I was in high school, I wasn't sure what I wanted to be. I dabbled in so many things. I took so many different classes trying to find my desire, my prime interest. I tasted so many different careers and occupations. Artist, filmmaker, attorney, poet, politics, doctor, business. After watching the first season the the
X files I was convinced I'd make a great
FBI agent. I wanted to be so many things. So many things I wanted to be. So many dreams.
Then one semester in H.S. I got one of my poems published in a little compilation of poems and stories called the "Little Portion" and I got hooked. I wanted to write.
Below is the poem. Mind you it's riddled with teen angst, lonliness and cliched words. It has a high school retard effect to it. Plus I had no idea about line breaks and stuff. If you laugh while reading this, please don't do it front of me. All the words are jumbled, typos, nouns and adjectives light up the poem. But it was good enough to get pubished back then. Later on, I became one of the editors for the Little Portion. Fell into the anti-jock and anti-popular kids crowd and well anyway...at least I didn't shoot up my classmates.
The poem is called "little gatherings".
With the sip of a beer and a
puff of a smoke the feeling
I have seems to overwhelm me.
We sit around for absolutely
no reason at all and discuss
the strange world of the 17
year old mind. This usually
leads nowhere. A converation
of what we should do next now is
more important than when we'll
go home or even how we'll get home.
This dialogue of useless information
is humorous to our now half-intoxicated
brains. With another gulp of my cold
beverage I can see how these
gatherings provide more knowledge
about life than any words in a book
and with a whiff of my cigarette I
see how much I really don't know much
about this world. Now quiet, we do nothing
to break the silence but stare at each
other in the anticipation of the next
little gathering.
So there you have it. This is the poem that got me to write more. What's funny is that tonight, after taking a whiff of my cigarette, my brain half intoxicated and sipping my beer I still don't know what I want to do. I jumped on the dot com bandwagon and I'm kinda stuck on neutral.
I've come full circle. I'm back to that eternal question that I keep asking my cousins.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
"I don't know," they typically respond.
"What do you want to do?" they ask back.
"I don't know," I tell them. "I wish I knew."
End Transmission
