What color is your dinosaur?

I am still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Several career guides counsel people in my situation to concentrate on growing up first. Ha ha! Of course that is not what they say. They say to look for clues about what you like to do in what you enjoyed doing as a kid.

Joe's mom says she did this with her own kids. She watched what they liked to do when they were little, and it sort of correlated with what they ended up doing later in life. Except Joe, whose early interest was dinosaurs. (He also liked to rip things apart to see how they worked, and there is definitely some correlation there with his current hobbies.) I guess if computers hadn't come along, he might be out digging bones or something now instead of working for an investment company. Or maybe doing museum work, ala the movie "Night at the Museum" (which, if you haven't seen it, is hysterical, although my mom said she "didn't see what was so funny about it." I think this is because Dick van Dyke, whom she has always enjoyed watching and holds in high esteem, plays a character whose values are not exactly worthy of his alter egos Bert the chimney sweep or Rob Petrie).

Anyway, back to my interests as a kid and how they might help me figure out what to do now. Here is my list of what I liked to do from roughly ages 4 to 8:

1. Read
2. Swing
3. Read
4. Play with Fisher-Price people, house, and village and make up stories about them
5. Read

Did I mention I liked to read?

So, according to this list and the theory that what you liked as a child can help point you to a satisfying career as an adult, I should make a good city planner and swing set installer who can read instruction booklets.

Or possibly a writer of fiction who holds book readings out on the playground. (Of course, some readers of this blog, including my husband, might say that I am already a fiction writer).

Had I been more computer gifted, like Joe, perhaps I might have been the one to create the Sims, a computer game that lets you create people and whole towns and direct their lives and, generally, be bossy. (They say this game is very popular with female players.) But I came into the computer age rather late, and not exactly willingly (I remember telling my sister at one point that I didn't need a computer, just a word processor. Visionary I am not).

I admit I've always had a secret interest in being something of a career coach, helping other people figure out how to turn their interests into a great career. But I guess until I can do this for myself, no one will want to pay me to help them do it.

Another thing I did when I was young, according to my mother (who, as a Revisionist Historian, cannot always be trusted to tell things exactly the way they occurred -- with five children, she might actually be thinking of another child), was to correct people's grammar. So maybe after all I am in the right career.