possible futures for me

I spend a lot of time mulling over what I could do with myself in a permanent sort of way. Here are a few options I've come up with:

- I will find a suitable hippie lover and move to seaside Wellfleet, MA, where I will raise a bunch of kids in a ramshackle yet charming house. I'll give them a mix of Hebrew and nature-inspired names (Moses, Dune Clouds) and they'll be born knowing how to surf and play music, and will grow up to be kind of whittled-looking and have white-person dreds. For my part I'll work at something involving wool sweaters and boats, something hardcore and yet mystical, or else be an artist and collect driftwood. Our whole lives will be played out to a reggae beat.

OR

- I will get some suits and a job in a small yet bustling East Coast city, where I will proceed to work my way up to a management position and then to a relatively highly paid manager-of-management job. I'll join a gym, take taxis, and combat the pallor of cubicle lighting with the help of tanning salons. I will have a fat jock boyfriend named Mitch who wears white baseball hats. After years of vacuuming the beige rugs of my white-walled apartment in an apartment building I'll buy a condo in the suburbs and commute to work in a car that I'll owe lots of money on. I'll get my hair frosted regularly into stripes and read paperback novels with cartoon drawings of skinny young lasses with shopping bags on the covers and I will have achieved great success but sometimes I will get very drunk all by myself and wonder if I am dead yet or not.

OR

- I will sail around on a real, actual pirate ship, stealing cashmere goods and strawberry-shaped marzipan from leisure yachts. I'll shave my head and lose the use of one arm, which I will tell people was in a tremendous sword battle but actually happened when I slipped off the main mast for no good reason, just clumsiness, then denied the symptoms, then, when it was too late and gangrene appeared to be setting in, attempted to treat myself with topical antibiotics and a homemade Ace bandage. Also I won't swear but I'll say "Crap" a lot in a menacing voice. Eventually I will land on a small island where I can purchase a tract of land for myself, cash down and no questions asked, then live in what I will call a typical early-European wattle and daub hut but which will be more like a falling-down piece of crap type of house, but I'll refer to my possessions in archaic - or even, if I could muster it, Middle - English to sort of have a theme going, though I'll sometimes lie awake looking through the gaps in my roof at the stars or clouds or whatever and wonder if I am trying to be ironic and who is fooling who. But the climate will be tolerable for a small sustenance garden and I'll be fairly content, save for the lack of really good dental care.

OR

-I'll be accepted to a fairly prestigious doctoral program in which I'll study the origins, products, and sociopolitical structure of pretty much every group in the world. In addition to speaking several languages fluently I will have research skills which will enable me to find out pretty much any piece of information that ever existed. I will be so ensconsced in academia that I will forget that a world exists outside of academic institutions; this trait will evolve into a hard-to-take air of privilege easily understood as snobbery. My anxiety will run fairly high and edge toward panic, peaking when an opportunity arises to try to win a grant or award of some kind. My speech will consist of advanced vocabulary words and I will forsake my usual company for that of my classmates; however, my undergraduate education, having been rich in life skills such a using a Turkish toilet, facilitating consensus-based decision-making, and readily identifying the fiber content and dye process of indigenous craft products, yet poor in students-blowing-off-steam skills such as tapping a keg or sleeping with one's dormmates, will leave me unprepared for bonding with my fellow academics. Eventually, at the age of 57, I will graduate from college and find an adjunct position at a rural community college, where I will write several tomes which I'll require my students to read though each has the whiny, lecturing voice of someone seeking respect without really demanding it. Hard-pressed to find an audience for my increasingly unbearable work, I'll refer to my isolation as "obscurity", as though I am J.D. Salinger shielding myself from the demanding masses ravenous for a bit of my time. Then when I am 95 science will discover that the ingredients of ramen noodles, long my main source of nutrition, contain a preservative which will enable my soul and brain to die while my body lives on forever, uselessly pumping and circulating blood, and I will be displayed in the American Museum of Natural History as a curiosity.

OR

-I become America's Next Top Model