I had three serious career ambitions when I was very small. One: to be a professional toy-player. Two: to be a professional nose-picker.
“I don’t understand,” said my mother. “You mean you would be paid to pick your own nose, or other people’s noses?”
“Both,” I said.
“Well,” she reasoned. “It’s good to do something you love.”
The third was to own a restaurant in which each dish would be created from the base ingredients of poop or pee. Poop Steak with Pee Sauce. Pee-za. Spaghetti Poopagnese. Pee soup with Pooptzah Balls. And for dessert, a choice: Pee Ice Cream, Poop Pie, or Chocolate Pooping (like pudding, but more filling.) I made a menu out of construction paper, carefully crayoning a picture of each dish, but when I asked my teacher for help writing out the names of my creations, she called my mother.
“What?” my mother asked angrily. “Does every little girl have to want to be Barbie when she grows up?”
As I got older and more easily shamed, the list of possible occupations evolved into more conventional choices. I wanted to be princess. A bride. An astronaut. An archeologist like Indiana Jones. A Nazi hunter like Simon Wiesenthal. Around the age of ten, I settled on the rather quotidian aspiration of being a movie star, and to the horror of all who cared for my well-being, failed to outgrow it. Twelve years later, after graduating from college with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting with no agent, no manager, no offers and no marketable skills, my list of potential jobs looked like this:
1. Stage Actress
2. Film Actress
3. TV Actress
4. Star
5. Film Star
6. TV Star
Be realistic, warned the career self-help book my friend B.J. had shoplifted for me from Barnes & Noble.
7. Cynic
8. Raconteur
9. Wit
But don’t be afraid of a challenge!
10. Cynic, raconteur, and wit!
Think about your hobbies, the things you love to do. What are some careers that incorporate these elements?
11. Wino
12. Prostitute for broke, nocturnal singer/songwriter types in South Williamsburg
13. Cocaine dealer
And don’t be afraid to dream big!
14. Olympic bronze medalist, Ladies’ Figure Skating, Singles Event
15. HRH the Princess of Wales
16. President of the United States
“Go fuck yourself,” said my mother. The list of job options had been her idea. My mother is very big on lists: shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of things to obsess about in descending order of rationality, lists of people who skimped on the sweet table at their Oneg Shabbat.+ “Do you know your sister is in her first year of college and she’s already making all her spending money baby-sititing?”
“You don’t understand what it’s like New York right now,” I protested. “There’s nothing.”
“I’m putting your father on.”
YOU ARE READING
Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories
Non-FictionGrowing up in white-bread Omaha, Nebraska, Rachel Shukert was one of thirty-seven students (circa 1990) in Nebraska’s only Jewish elementary school. She spent her days dreaming of a fantasy Aryan boyfriend named Chris McPresbyterian, a tall blond go...
