What Dreams Become

Is it just me or does it seem that the older we get, the more we tend to tailor our dreams and aspirations to the cowardly, downsized, dimensions of what we perceive to be our actual abilities and limitations? For instance, if when I was six years old, some one would have asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd have said, "I want to be a X-man like Gambit!" I'd have professed it with so much conviction and ignorant tenacity that I just might have convinced even a slightly-sane adult that I might one day, actually posses the ability to impregnate inanimate objects with ungodly amounts of kinetic energy and then hurl them with unmarked precision at anything that I very damn well wanted to blow up.

And I practiced. I practiced my "bo staff" until my mother needed it to sweep the kitchen again. I practiced flaming card tricks until I set the bathroom rug on fire and set off the smoke detector; twice. I practicing jumping off of high furniture and landing in dramatic, looming crouches to make the stunts appear effortless. I practiced being an X-man for three long years. And from the ages of six to nine, I set no ace of spades ablaze with my bare hands. The purple and blue bruises about my brothers' noggins served as a testimony to bo staff skills or lack thereof. My feeble attempts at replicating Gambit's sultry, Cajun accent got me a lot of blank stares and landed me a couple speech therapy sessions with a man who possesed the very accent I was trying to mimic! And my mother, my poor, saint of a mother, would not, for the life of me, buy the damn costume! Not for Halloween or any other occasion. My abilities, my gender, my genetic make-up did no match that of person I aspired to become so, at nine years old, I learned what it meant to "settle". And I did.



I settled on becoming a teen-age mutant ninja turtle! No special powers required, just a half shell, a weapon and a swath of colored fabric with eye holes removed. I abandoned my love of bo staff fighting (because no one wants to be Donatello!) and took up the nunchucks! I became skilled at kickin' ass, takin' names, and eatin' pizza! I even tried my hand at skateboarding and have the scars to prove it. "Cowabunga" found its way into most of my elementary school work and not just in my writing lessons. For example; two plus two equals FOUR COWABUNGA!!!



Months later (I won't admit how many) I'd settle for being a Power Ranger (the green one, Tommy). Its clear that I never quite grasped the whole gender aspect, but least they were human. I learned to keep my goals of becoming a super hero between myself and my peers, because grown-ups had the uncanny ability of reminding children that they could be absolutely anything in this life they wanted to be as long as it came with good benefits and could support a family of of at least 2.7 children and a Labrador retriever.

By my preteens I learned that "physician" served as a great diversion when asked of my future occupational plans and I used it all the way up until college and somewhere along the lines convinced myself as well. That is, until, I came face-to-face with calculus and the realization that the function of "x" in regards to the derivative of any cubic polynomial does not and will not ever equal "COWABUNGA!"


My father stewed himself in worries when I changed my major to anthropology. I think sometimes he awakened in cold sweats after nightmares about being chased through the rain forests of Papua New Guinea by a spear wielding Margaret Mead and angry Huli wigmen with poison darts. He'd often call me at odd hours of the night asking me what I expected to do with a degree in anthropology as if I was going to be attempting a career in alchemy or street mime. My mother, though much more supportive and hopeful, began heaving all of her monthly income into her retirement plan. "Never can be too prepared for a rainy day", she'd say, nervously. I've stopped telling my grandfather of my intentions of becoming a writer and a filmmaker out of fear that his pacemaker might not save him this time around. I can't even use the term "artist" in a sentence around my grandmother without her tactfully incorporating "poverty", "starving" and "cardboard boxes" into something that sounds too much like casual conversation to be a real lecture.


Currently the most outlandish of my dreams involves me playing lead guitar and vocals in my raging, feminist, cover band. It'd be named something spectacular like "The Vegan Cupcakes" or perhaps "Vagina Wig". We'd cover Tracy Chapman to Dave Matthews Band to Korn and tour the globe performing at gay celebrity weddings and sociopolitical banquets about animal rights or the legalization of marijuana. Who knows? Maybe we'll win a Grammy or two and be featured on E True Hollywood Story or VH1's Driven, at best. And the point is, I know this ideal is ridiculous! Why, you ask? Because I've been playing guitar for upwards of three years and couldn't convince a deaf man that I've ever held one! As far as singing is concerned, I'm not the one you want to give a microphone to. I don't personally know enough musically talented feminists to have a ping pong match with, let alone start a band! But my point is; a girl can dream! Can't she?


Who said our dreams had to be trimmed to fit our current abilities as if talents can't be acquired, connections can't be made, or bridges built? There will always be safe roads, and secure, well-lit pathways into other people's ideas of success and fortune. But if people take the time to light their own ways and blaze their own trails, there will be many more lights left on for the, otherwise meek and meager, to take the roads less traveled.


These days I hold fast to the remnants of my youth by refusing to bury my childish fantasies under piles of mundane rubble. As adults we tend to become saturated in the stink of humdrum society and we lose our grasps on our dreams when the grit and grime of hard times and survival makes them slick with reality. Maturity is an expected and sometimes welcomed phenomenon in the lives of the vaguely regular, but it needn't come at the cost of that which makes us uniquely human; our ability to manifest dreams into reality.