It is the fervent wish of everyone that they may be able to excel in the profession of their choice, preferably, interesting, socially useful, financially rewarding, intellectually stimulating, held in high esteem, etc.
I am suddenly, at this very minute, in an extremely and unaccountably frivolous mood. Hence, I shall indulge.
Most young male blobs today would choose professions in law, finance, banking, accounting, and for the less greedy, though not necessarily less ambitious, engineers. Let us pretend for a while that we could indeed have the profession of our choice, any choice. Let us remove the cloaks and gloves of propriety and social mores, and hence expand our scope of choices to more than what is merely ‘the best and sane choice among my limited options’.
I’ll start!
I want to be either an All Star (oh, only the top 30 best players qualify) professional basketball player in the best professional basketball league on the planet (if you don’t know what I am talking about, here’s an idea: Walk to the seaside and tie approx 1 ton of bricks to your foot, no make that feet, and then plunge in.), a member of a successful rock band (MCR would do just fine, thank you very much.), or, and get this, it’s a radical departure from the above 2 flamboyant choices, a popular and much read professional writer. I’d pick basketball player first, writer second, and rock musician third.
Snapping closely on the heels of the above of course would be that of self serving entrepreneur yuppie, most likely a free lancing IT consultant who lives in a block of refurbished and highly exclusive dwellings along the docks with a fantastic and splendid view of the river or seafront, with a sleek noiseless sports car powered by a twin turbo engine with a dual shaft top rotating twin cams and in-car surround sound system. Naturally, the apartment I live in would be outfitted with surround sound systems in every room, all remote controlled by a controller that I can pick up and utilize to activate my chosen play list every time I walk into the apartment. Naturally, it’d be decorated with sleek, plush, dark grey sofas, the floors would be spotlessly white, there’d be big screen doors overlooking the sea to let in lots of natural light, the bathrooms would have masculine black towels, un-named dark pastel coloured ceramic jars and bottles containing various toiletries, and a bath tub with Jacuzzi functions. I’d also be that sort of IT consultant, who gets to kick back and travel a bit, and write books in his free time, and pepper it with lots of lines like ‘in my consulting work, I … $20m dollars…45% reduction in…with a correlating 40% improvement in…’.
Yeah right.
More likely, I’d be that type of backroom number cruncher type who labour for hours in a dark room, with 5 other guys all hunched desperately over their keyboards, trying to hack together a complicated ERP program, for which our company can bill the client RM12m (please add another 15% for after sales support and service) and give us our paltry salary of RM2.5k a month. And we would not be allowed to see sunlight at all, nor are we allowed out for lunches, and our meals would be passed to us through a flap in the door, not unlike a cat flap. And then we’d all leave work at 11pm and take our little motorbikes home to our low cost flats and spend a further 30 minutes scratching our heads and calculating how to stretch our dollar further and whether we can meet the next instalments on our car and home mortgage payments, not to mention the normal bills, saving for the kids’ education, insurance, and a host of other expenses which frankly speaking, when totalled, is enough to send me into a pit of depression from which suicide is the only way out.
But come, let us away in haste from such morbid thoughts, and back to the pipe dream.
So, professional basketball player. Money. Check. Do something I like. Check. Not environmentally and socially destructive. Check. In fact, as a form of healthy entertainment, it probably is socially constructive. What is not to like? You get professionals taking care of your fitness regimes, your nutrition and diet is professionally prescribed for you, you are paid millions and millions, you get to do a job that you’d gladly do for free at the local playground anyway, you are good and recognized at it, you get to travel, and you get to retire in your mid thirties, rich and comfortable.
Writer. I’m the first to admit I have no talent for it. None at all whatsoever. Short stories? I got no plot. Novels? No stamina. And no plot. I guess the only shot I’ve got is to be one of those National Geographic writers, or freelance travelling journalists. But no, I won’t risk a slow death in Iraq on international TV. And, no talent. Perhaps I could be a travel writer. Hmm…but seriously, as a writer, you basically book yourself a few months in some remote place ‘for inspiration’ (but you are, in fact, taking a holiday), walk around, poke around, do nothing much, have long seaside walks, put your feet up by the fire, then get down to it and write a couple hundred pages of your observations and various other bits, get a sucker to sell it, put it in nice packaging, bribe someone to write good reviews for it, and add at the back endorsements like “Best book I’ve read since Feb 2008. Hilarious, had me up in stitches. – Peter Tan”, or invent some white guy’s name, since Peter Tan doesn’t seem to carry much literary weight, hence “An absolute must, a can’t put down, one of the truly star writers of the generation. – Phillip Forest”, or some other equally posh name. Of course, any endorsement from something with a “Daily” or a “Journal” or a “Times” would help. Additionally, while we are at it, let me make another one up: “Great book. Best for reading when you’ve got nothing to do while shitting and you have read the obituaries 16.5 days in a row – Some-guy-who-is-shitting-and-has-read-the-obituaries-16.5-days-in-a-row”.
Ergh, got pulled from this excellently amusing activity to go and do some real work. Gotta stop here.
