by Katherine—Age 29—New York City

The embarrassing, complete list:

Kindergarten:
Great artist. Great philosopher. Write treatises about things. Composer (later realized do not comprehend music)

Second grade:
Scientist, like Louis Pasteur or Marie Curie (classroom had book nook with career series); Margaret Mead (did not totally understand what she’d done, but liked her style as represented in book-nook career books); chicken farmer (eggs not meat, of course); paleontologist; designer of fountains

Fourth grade:
Conceptual artist; director of music videos; choreographer (am inspired by Paula Abdul videos watched at friend’s house); makeup artist; interior decorator; inventor (save world with clean energy from perpetual motion. Invent flying machine); architect

Seventh grade:
Movie director; writer (with a bullet! Possibilities included: Virginia Woolf, eminent playwright, publish memoirs and become instantly famous, Sylvia Plath. Victor Hugo, for some reason); shaman-esque figure; successful child actress; manufacturer, with friend Ellie, of line of natural cosmetics

Ninth grade:
Creative writing teacher; visionary administrator of new, perfect school; rock star, or famous punk-rock muse; itinerant music journalist like Cameron Crowe; playwright; coffee shop or art-house movie theater owner; work at Sassy magazine; Stewart Brand; vintage clothing finder/buyer

Rest of high school:
Set designer; travel writer; science writer; film critic; founder and editor in chief of magazine; photographer, preferably for National Geographic; writer of experimental fiction; combiner of photography and experimental fiction; EIC of The New Yorker (snert)

College:
Field anthropologist; professional academic feminist; landlord; buyer and renovator of old houses; self-sufficient hippie (geodesic dome, garden, animals, boyfriend); endless bohemian; famous literary critic; New Yorker staff writer; glam, long-format journalist; producer, ‘This American Life’; PA on films; maker of documentaries; long-haul trucker; endocrinologist; college professor (w/ reservations); building caretaker; writer of polemical books about what’s wrong with society and why; fire lookout on remote mountain, á la Jack Kerouac in Dharma Bums; seller of things on eBay, fuck everything

Postcollege:
Most of the above, plus: hospital bioethics board (for a month, right after graduation); doctor (for a week, same time period); editor of book review section at a magazine; therapist; science writer; mother, all of a sudden

Things I never wanted to be:
President, kindergarten teacher, elected office of any kind, crime scene investigator, lawyer (okay, maybe for a few minutes), middle manager, anything at a Fortune 500 Company, ever; statistician, news reporter, topologist, school psychologist, professional chef

(Image: Justin Cormack)

by Katherine—Age 28—New York City

Like most Americans, I wanted to get rich quick. This was around age eight or nine; I bursted with schemes, like starting a henhouse in our suburban backyard and selling eggs. My mother smiled noncommittally and I went back to the drawing board, dreaming of self-sufficiency and doing things my way. Several years later, hepped up on Babysitter’s Club books, I found a couple local mothers looking for cheap childcare. The responsibility caused panic attacks, worse than the time mom gave me twenty dollars to keep and I lost it under the gumball machine at Food Star. Ashamed of myself, I stayed out of the workforce till age 15, when I got a gig doing data entry after school at a family-owned health food store. Mind-numbing. Working at the coffee shop was better: customers, co-workers, interaction, the rich smell of beans in my clothes, good clean post-work exhaustion. College, my parents told me, was job number one, and I listened; the summer jobs (a museum, a restaurant, some desperate stabs at temping almost as panic-inducing as babysitting) hardly counted. One winter I worked for my father putting up oak siding outdoors. And I fretted about the future. I’d never wanted a job, not the kind where you apply and there’s a boss and you go and, my god, the panic again. Paid work felt like an ocean wave, something that was going to swallow me whole. I interned for a newspaper, a magazine. They were all right but I was still waiting to feel at home, the way I had in art studios and theaters, which always felt both fertile and safe. I was hoping to flail into something I cared about, a calling, a tribe. After according every job under the sun its fifteen minutes inside my head, I went to the best graduate program in English I could get into. The monastic commitment seemingly required of academics frightened me; furthermore, grad school didn’t feel like college. I’m out now, masters degreed, with a knowledge-worker job that pays the bills and oscillates between oppressive and interesting. I left with a feeling I was looking for something, looking to make good on something, a long-time dream. Be a creative person who lives in the city. Balance panic and desire, independence and worthwhileness. Know interesting people, do interesting things, and make ends meet. Is it too much to ask?

Image: wheany

Each day is quite different from the last. I am a mother. I am a grad student. My work, however, can scarcely be summed by such labels.

When I was five, my parents decided to go to grad school. In the five years that followed I was very much on my own, save my older brother. I once swore I would never repeat this grave error in judgment that my parents had made. And yet, here I am, riddled with guilt, determined to change the outcome.

This was a day when my daughter had a play date with her grandmother. My head was spinning with ideas from the night before. I snuck past the nagging feeling that my mother couldn’t handle the day that she would face. I blew a kiss to my girl through the kitchen window, and was off.

My day was frantic but still. I sat in the same spot in the library; writing, reading, thinking. But in those brief moments of self-consciousness, when the music in my head took pause, I could feel the ridicule of a younger student”¦the transparency of my idiocy. I had been whispering some nonsense aloud. I bit my lip so hard it began to bleed. But soon none of it would matter. The post-rock in my ear would revive my belief in an ideal truth, and the importance of aiming toward it. On this day, in a creative whirlwind, I sketched my thesis.

This was a day when my books lay still on the shelf. I made cranberry pear pie in an attempt to warm this big old house. My little girl spent the morning dancing to some early 90′s ambient in the living room. She wanted me to join her, but I couldn’t fain interest in being silly. My thoughts swirled around the book I hoped to write one day about becoming a mother. My insights on the subject were entirely theoretical. Then I caught a glimpse of her slow squat followed by an awkward spin. She made me smile and forget myself.

My pie was sweet, my house was warm. Yet my lack of contentment with such mundane accomplishments drove the flux between my inadequacy in any single role, and my purpose.

We spent the afternoon at the local pool. She loves to swim.

I leave my quiet home on the lake and arrive at work every weekday at 11:00 am. Standing behind the register of our family restaurant, I take in its familiar sights and sounds.

A three-year-old throws a tantrum when his pregnant tattooed mother takes away the salt shaker he was busy sucking on. My overworked husband at the grill behind me mutters something about a plastic bag and the kid’s head.

The drunk on the other end of the counter mistakenly pours thousand island dressing on his lasagna instead of his salad and tries to convince the waitress that he meant to and that it tastes good like that. An hour later we find him sleeping behind our dumpster. A customer who also doubles as a singer/philosopher sits next to him and tells anyone who will listen that when he gets old and is in a nursing home and isn’t counting his toes or the flies on the wall he’s going to go up to all the old ladies and sing “We’ve Only Just Begun.” A businessman whacks a fly with the newspaper he’s reading. A meth user puts a crossword in front of him and a pencil in his hand to disguise his sleep for concentration. The phone rings. Someone wants to know the number to the Chinese take-out place up the road.

The lady across the street meanders over and referring to me as her aunt, asks me if the Red Sox are playing tonight and what time and who’s pitching and would I write it down for her. Then in her accusing victim voice she tells me how she didn’t win at the BINGO this week and can I buy her a coffee. I agree for the hundredth time only to have her return a few minutes later and tell me I didn’t put enough cream in it.

A stranger sits at the counter and eats our number one breakfast special heartily.

Our dishwasher tells me her kid has just been suspended from school and she has to leave. She leaves me doing the dishes for an hour. The police show up and take one of my waitresses outside to inform her that her mother has been reported missing.

My job is to oversee this. When my husband bought this restaurant, he told me it would be easy. Just run the cash register.

When it all started I took phone calls and fixed problems. Technical people called me, software engineers, and I helped them do things that I could never explain to my family. I felt like I had two lives: my days were filled with cubicles and computers, my nights were spent with the cat, sit-coms, rum and coke, and lots of weed.

Too much weed. The pattern on the carpet in the office seemed to shimmy and slide, like a stream full of spawning salmon.

We discovered Amato’s cheese steaks. We were in there three or four times a week. I developed a pain in my side. “My guts is bad,” I would moan. I started missing a lot of work.

The doctor said it was gas. I disagreed. He started the tests: sonogram, upper GI, lower GI—after the barium in the backdoor, I decided it must be gas. I stopped eating cheese steaks and it went away.

I switched companies. For awhile, I took phone calls and fixed problems. Then, the Director of my department because Vice President of another. He took me with him. I was suddenly a software engineer.

Then I was senior software engineer. Then I was a lead engineer. It all happened so quickly. I became so big. I never realized that other people might be right when we disagreed. I had the ear of the VP.

I designed a large system for managing email blah blah. We threw it together. It actually worked, but nothing else did.

It was called a death march. Things began to fall apart. I switched departments and was promptly fired.

For a year there was nothing: I had a tiny apartment by the ocean. I had a rat who would come out in the middle of every night to dance in the kitchen, no matter how often I ran out and drunkenly yelled at him.

I sobered up, completely, and when I went back I took phone calls and fixed problems. I worked hard, worked well, and people took notice.

Someone encouraged me to apply for a spot in technical publications. I became a technical writer. I write doc; I teach people how to install things, configure things, and build things with our things. I write books for software engineers. It has been 25 months.

I no longer feel like I have to have two lives.

Cleveland, 1987. Most commuters shuttling home on Detroit Road to their five-bedroom tract houses miss Golden Buddha, hidden in a strip mall between a barbershop and a hardware store. I come here after school, three days a week.

Wash rice! Wash rice!

Mrs. Wu’s high-pitched voice; always the first words I hear when I open the front door, the tinkling of chimes announcing my arrival. I head toward the back, past the metal and brown vinyl chairs lined up against the faux-wood paneled walls. Around the glass counter filled with cheap imported gifts and chewing gum. The woks aren’t heated yet, but when they are, the lard—the cooking medium of choice—vaporizes on contact, filling the air with a heavy scent, so thick it hangs in my hair and lingers in my clothing. I am permitted only to dunk egg rolls, wontons, and precooked ribs in the boiling lard of the deep fryer. I continue past the small stainless steel worktable tucked in among drums of lard, cooked shrimp chips, chopped vegetables, and rice; boxes of almond cookies, fortune cookies, and takeout containers; where, for the rest of the night, I will package finished dishes in white takeout containers and stack them in brown bags; I’ll fill wax paper bags with shrimp chips, egg rolls, and almond cookies. I continue to the sink in the back—the sink used for washing rice and dunking the mop. Mr. Wu is at the chopping board, cleaver in hand, hacking away at stacks of bok choy, celery, onions, and green peppers. Mr. Wu never speaks to me directly. His constant scowling tells there is more to his story, beyond his anger. I know only that it involves an escape by boat from Shanghai. Being a shy and awkward teenager, I don’t ask.

Mrs. Wu has filled two three-foot diameter metal basins with rice. I slide one into the sink and start rhythmically rubbing the rice grains between my palms, turning the water a milky white. Their children come in though the back door. School’s out; they’ll stay until closing. If it’s warm they’ll disappear into the alley around back. When Mr. Wu needs a cigarette, he’ll join them. If the evening lulls, Mrs. Wu will command, “Teach children.” I’ve already taught their daughter how to tell time and their son how to add. For now, I keep washing the rice.

What had possessed me to think I wanted to be a nurse? I was eighteen years old, filling a washbasin and crying at the sink in the eight bed women’s ward. I was dressed in my blue and white stripped uniform, white stockings and oxfords. The starched cap worn by nursing students was bobby pinned to my hair.

I had just met my first patient. I introduced myself and told her I was going to help her get bathed and make her bed. She was a tiny, wrinkled woman with sparse white hair and milky blue eyes. Her arms were folded across her chest, her lips tight and unsmiling. She looked at me but did not speak. I forced a smile and said she would feel better after a bath. She just stared.

I took the flannel bath blanket from the bedside table and placed it over the bedspread. As I pulled the covers from beneath the bath blanket bits of cold scrambled egg fell on the floor. A penetrating, foul odor, which I soon learned was the odor of gangrene, hung in the air. Dark urine drained through a plastic tube into a bottle on the floor.

This was not like our lessons in the Nursing Arts Lab where students practiced giving bed baths to each other. We learned the proper temperature of the water, how to hold the washcloth, how to drape the bath blanket to maintain modesty and prevent chilling, how to give back rubs and how to change bed linens with the patient in bed.

I could not run. I could not fail the patient or myself. I wiped my tears on my sleeves and carried the basin filled with warm water back to my patient.

I was just out of high school, fresh off the chopping block and had to find my means of living. I was in the arcade playing some video games to separate this new adult feeling, when I saw a huddle of blue shirt and khaki pants gang. I soon realized they weren’t just really close friends but Best Buy employees. I was oddly interested. That night I decided I wanted to be part of that gang that walks through the food court in the mall like they own it, so I started to dial the numbers. I made it through the first test, the second interview and the third with the Big Cheese. This has to be something crazy to have to go through this much, or so I thought…

I could have never imagined myself in retail, quiet little me trying to prey on the weaknesses of the retail whores. I would have thought I would be in sunny California working with oceanographers, or training dolphins: Boy was I in for a reality check! I felt like I stepped back into the classroom or applied to Best Buy college; what a slap in the face. Eventually I got used to the acronyms and morning meeting huddles, cheering out 518 dominate!! Did I really just yell that at nine o’clock in the morning? What the hell am I doing the teapot dance for?

I slowly eased into the culture, accepted the values and it became my life. I went from department to department, moved my way up the corporate ladder always wishing I had just moved to California to fulfill my dream. Year after year my dream got smaller and smaller, until finally it was gone. There wasn’t even a remnant left behind, just an emptiness. I started to get high every day trying to find some extra curricular activity to fill the void, that just filled my head with worries and my belly with snacks. Although I always maintained my responsibilities, I searched for joy and bought it all!

Steadily approaching my seventh year I started to see the light, I pierced this cushion and fell flat on my ass and for the first time in a while I started to care about my path. The world needed to know who I am, and see what I have to give back. The new me fresh, drug free and full of aspiration with a whole new outlook on life. I will start all over again and go back to school, working somewhere new that is focused on actually helping people and not encouraging them to spend their grocery money on an Xbox 360. I plan to reinvent myself, to take hold of my life and live it like I want to…to be continued…

Anyone would call my meteoric rise from the lowly position of production assistant to digital designer in less than six month’s time an act of dumb luck or the result of some form of blackmail. The truth is I’ve worked exceedingly hard for it. I get up at 4.15 every morning. I work ten hour days, without breaks. At the end of the day, I drive home and start working again. I work on the weekends, lying in bed with my laptop, never quite sure if it’s Saturday or Sunday. I barely hear the clock ticking. I remember reading somewhere that if you want to live a long life you should invest in family and friends. Please tell me, what are those?

I spend 50 to 60 hours a week creating something you will never touch, or smell, or taste. I use color schemes and prose to elicit the feelings I think you should experience when looking at my work. I think I’m being clever. I make a living creating little pieces of disposable art: beautiful to look at, but intangible in any other way.

When you buy my work, and send it around to your family and friends, it is enjoyed for a time, and then cast aside like most things for something new. All of my time amounting to nothing more than an email sent around to friends and family to be enjoyed for a moment. I tell myself that what I’m doing is important, that people use my work as a means to connect and share. But it gnaws at me. What does it say about my work/life balance that I don’t even save enough of my own time to connect and share with the people I love? I can’t even afford to buy my own house, let alone rent an apartment in the city…yet.

My rise on the corporate food chain, from menial assistant to a full-fledged designer, has been a deliberate and concentrated effort. I’ve put in the hours, sacrificed the vacations and sick leave. I pass on the corporate freebies that are native to the software industry culture”¦beer and liquor in the office fridge, video games in the break room, pizza Fridays, and very, very casual dress because they distract me from my goal. My eyes are on the prize. I fancy being an Art Director by age 35. Wish me luck.

I worked on the archive for a year, and felt I knew the man whose papers I cataloged. The collection started with birth, ended with death. All he’d done was meticulously stored in a series of boxes. These had to be examined before his wealthy family donated them to the historical society. They wanted to know what was there before they opened the collection to public scrutiny. He’d been an artist. He painted, composed. His work wasn’t great, though he did possess one great talent: he supported artists, people whose work would stand the test of time.

The snapshot was in a box of miscellaneous photographs. It was small, black and white, creased. On the reverse it read: Munich, 1942. There were three figures. I recognized two of them: the philanthropist’s brother and sister. They stood with a third figure next to a plane. It was the plane’s logo, repeated on the third figure’s shirt, that startled me. The plane, the man’s uniform, were covered in swastikas. It was inexplicable. I started its database entry and froze when it came time for a description.

It should have been simple. I’d catalog it. Someday, some historian would explore the archive and come across this photograph that seemed without context.

It could have been simple. I’d destroy it. History was filled with gaps in narrative that historians filled in as they could. I’d become a part of the making of that unstable canvass. The philanthropist was a good man. Was there value in preserving his name? Was this the price? As a child, I believed in absolutes. The urge, programmed into us, is learned not by questions, but by route. As an adult, I learned the power of ambiguity.

Daylight was fading. I switched on a lamp. It illuminated the photograph. His sister’s smile was graceful. His brother was laughing. Even the Nazi looked friendly. He may have had a family. He was somebody’s son. In this, the void that divided him from me, from anyone, was not so vast; this truth was disquieting.

I put on my jacket, reached for the photo, stopped. How would history judge these people? How would it judge me if I stole the photograph? If I didn’t? I heard a bus rush by and looked up to see it moving toward my stop. I hurried for the door.