Childhood Dreaming

Day 2 and I'm not really sure what to write. I knew this was going to be difficult. I'm basically trying to fish around in my head, take an incomplete thought, and sort it out in this format. It's like when a guy goes into Shark Tank and is pre-sales. Actually, it's worse than that.

One thing I've been thinking about lately are childhood dreams. Last week I read The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. It's an amazing story. For those not familiar with it, Randy Pausch was a professor diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was given just a few months to live. The book is based on his "Last Lecture" that he gave and is available on YouTube. (I haven't watched it yet, because if the book is an indication it's going to be emotionally rough to watch.) Randy is essentially distilling all his knowledge about life into the smallest pieces so he can share it with his children before he goes.

Randy talks a lot about how he made his childhood dreams come true in some form or another. I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what my childhood dreams were. Did I have so many that they just never cemented themselves in my memory? Did I give up on them early and not bother remembering them? Or did I not have that many? There's a few of them that I can think of, but they just seem like normal kid stuff, like being an astronaut and going into space, or being able to become Batman.

I guess if I had to find one in my memories, in it's truest form, I wanted to be a storyteller. I wanted to write and draw comic books. I watched a VHS tape called How To Draw The Marvel Way, but never quite got that good. I tried, but I gave up to easily. I wanted to make a movie once using my GI Joe action figures. My dad somehow got a hold of a camera and I did it. I don't think I ever watched it, but it's still somewhere in my parents house. I would make up elaborate stories and tales, sometimes for entertainment, sometimes at school to seem interesting and because I was bored.

I wanted to create things and build things. I build a play set for by actions figures out of K'Nex. Actually, I built a few different versions of them. They were great. Multiple levels and I would mock up, jail cells for the bad guys and computer terminals.

In the end, I guess my childhood dream could be distilled into one word: creator. And now that I realize that, maybe I've already, in someway at least, achieved my childhood dream. Now, I just need to find a way to make some money achieving that dream, instead of doing it for free. But at least I'm doing it, that alone counts as an achievement.