What Else Could I Be?

All apologies. Its been a month nearly and I suppose my journal has also suffered with my life so full of stuff. I wonder if it bodes well for readers of blogs that when they get something from us it's when our lives have calmed enough to see us type them up. But this reflecting aside, there is much to explore on the front of what else I could be, other than a foppish quoter of lyrics. Raise your hand if you saw it coming.

I could have been a teacher, although right now I AM in some capacity. He knows three chords already! But my real aim here was to take the two things I am most in love with right now and put one in the hands of the other. Like all teachers, my end game is a relatively selfish one. It must be an ancient animal instinct to want to see a man holding/using/building something out of wood. Us ladies can't seem to resist a man splitting a log, carting a little one in a wagon, or playing a guitar. The command of an instrument is not unlike the taming of an animal. Its magnificent and sexual to watch somebody masterfully (or adorably stumblingly) use an instrument that mystifies, excites, and eludes them.

I could have been an erotic novelist.

There was room in my head a long time ago for social work or psychiatry. If there were such a specialist willing to desert themselves in the most vivid and terrifyingly cerebral landscape: the artist's mind. Everyone else who I would deal with would surely leave after one diagnoses. I don't agree with the idea of normal, and generally speaking people seek out the comfort of that title. I would be happy to tell every patient they were functionally f*cked up and let them go on, with some guidance perhaps on how to deal with the un-crazies they'd unfortunately encounter in our sometimes very plain world.

I could have been a philosopher. And I'm by no means money-hungry, but this kind of a gig is really only lucrative if you have an empire who funds your work while you graze in fields all day and converse with civilians in the streets to rouse some heady dialogue. And for this, it would need to be both a very different political system, and probably also 400 BCE.

Failed scientist, mathematician and engineer are also career options for me. I guess right now I'm failing excellently at these, and will count them in the win column.

But for today, it seems, I have lined up two co-hosts for this week's open mic which I won't be able to attend, and it has become a symbolic moment for me. If I can create something that can't be easily measured or contained, whose future is unpredictable and whose potential is immense and completely dependent of my own efforts, I can do a lot of things in this lifetime.

I can run it into the ground, or I can run away from it, or I can just run. Just run it. There's still time for me to be all kinds of else.