Mmm, banana

Making me proud

49. When I was 12, I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer or computer engineer, because I liked computers.  A year later, I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew I hated programming and I wanted to do something more creative.  My entire extended family still talks about this as if I let them down by not becoming a professional scientist/engineer/smart guy.  It’s almost been ten years and they talk about it as if I dropped out of a doctoral program at Oxford to join the Carnival.  WTF.

Mmm, bananaSo there I was, playing lazer tag with a chick I barely know (I mean that as a compliment), ((ouch)) when I saw some Runts, M & M’s, and Skittles in those nifty little candy machines.  You’ve probably seen them.  They look like this:

Instantly I was transported to my youth, when we would go out to eat on weekends.  Being a sweet-loving youth, I would long for gumballs or runts from the candy machines.  My pops would sometimes buy some Runts for us all, but most of the time he’d just move past them.  Since my weekly rate was $5, I rarely had enough money left over for any candies (do you know how much ninja turtle action figures cost??).  I told myself that I would eventually have enough disposable income to buy candies whenever I saw one of those machines and felt like a sweet confectionery.

Actually, the candy machines of my youth were more like this one:

or this one:

Anyway,  I realized that I wasn’t living up to the standards I had set for myself so long ago.  I wasn’t going back in time and giving myself Super Nintendo games I picked up in a pawn (pwn!) shop, I wasn’t fighting crime, I wasn’t becoming a doctor president, I wasn’t finishing my collection of awesome ninja turtles and making time every day to play with them, and I wasn’t making $300k a year and buying my parents a house

This is especially hard for me, because I remember being a kid.  And I remember thinking that someday, in the future, I would look back at myself and be proud of how lucid and mature I was.  Then again, perhaps my irrationality happened at age 9 and my coolness didn’t manifest until far, far later. ((Any second now…))

So I’ve decided to make me proud.  I’m going to work at it until I accomplish all of the goals I set for myself back when I didn’t have a sense of the cost of ‘rent’ or the feeling of ‘really, really hard work’ or ‘failure.’

But first, I’m buying me some Runts.

49. When I was 12, I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer or computer engineer, because I liked computers.  A year later, I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew I hated programming and I wanted to do something more creative.  My entire extended family still talks about this as…

Comments

  1. I remember those cany things clearly; I always found the candy inside to be stale and nearly tasteless, and not worth the 25C. I applaud the sentiment, though!