The Dinosaur Girl Who Dreamed of Space

18-yr-old me in Machu Picchu, Peru. 2013.

Howdy, friends! Today is Study Day, a supposed day of rest before Finals rear their ugly head and toss anyone at college into Dante's ninth circle of hell (shout out to my classmate who hit me with this phrase the other day and gained my eternal respect).  I've been pretty busy between end-of-semester work and study abroad shenanigans, AND I'm writing a story about a VERY complex art heist, but something occurred to me. 

Life never turns out the way you plan. And that's okay.

Take me, for example. When I was little, I could roll around on the floor and scream because I didn't want to learn how to read. I didn't know my letters and just memorized the alphabet song. I would shriek that reading was "killing me". I was a weird little science kid. I mean, at one point I wrote out a list of all the things I wanted to be when I grew up. For some reason I remember it avidly, sitting on my parents' bed at my old house and scribbling on a piece of drawing paper. Some of my career prospects were to be a

---

*scuba diver,  marine biologist and oceanographer 

*archaeologist (specifically an Egyptologist so I could explore the pyramids)

*paleontologist (I really, really was fascinated by dinosaurs and had all kinds of books about them when I was about seven.)

*astronaut (I also hand-wrote and illustrated a book all about space and begged my parents for a telescope. Me and my dad found a star with four planets surrounding it.)

*work with Jane Goodall to study chimps

*nature photographer for National Geographic


Like I said, hardcore science. I really wanted to tread where few humans dared. Jane Goodall was my hero; spending her life with chimps and helping them (my mom has always had this joke where my real family is a gorilla family; I'm not even really sure how that started). I still would trip over myself to work for NG, but I hardly think about dinos anymore after someone told me that being an archaeologist/paleontologist is just sitting in a hole brushing away dirt. And astronaut? No way. The only way you'd get me in a spaceship was if you told me JK Rowling was sitting inside the cock pit. I've no clue what happened to the whole marine biologist thing. I think it's because science is not my forte. Well--MATH is not my forte and it has a close courtship with science. 


The thought is, if you'd told 20/20 vision, eight-year-old me that I'd grow up to need glasses and hadn't so much as been in a jungle and photographed a toucan yet, she would be very displeased. However, I have WRITTEN about Egyptian ruins, been to the ocean, know a thing or two about anthropology and even have taken some courses on astronomy! If you mentioned that I'd been to Peru, was semi-bilingual and wanted a job in the same historic field as Indiana Jones,  she might just get excited. (Just don't mention how I mean more bow-ties and glasses than the whip and fedora!)


What did you guys want to be when you were little? Were you as out-there as I was, or did you follow the doctor-lawyer-teacher frame of mind?  Oh, also I burned to go to Julliard to be an actress when I was about fifteen. :)


X, Rachael