Plumbing the depths of Tanis

I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark on Saturday and I was immediately reminded of how intimately that movie is linked to my childhood. I remember being a kid and watching Harrison Ford evading poison darts, outrunning gigantic boulders and swinging over bottomless chasms with his whip, and just thinking "wow, I really want to be an archeologist." And so, from ages five to eight, archeology was to be my chosen path in life. I would one day have a sweet day job teaching Old World History to a class filled with swooning female college students, and I'd spend my week-ends pillaging and plundering forgotten tombs/temples/what-have-you, squaring off against scimitar wielding fiends and occult-obsessed Nazis (I guess it never occurred to me that I could potentially be an adventurer if I really wanted to, but certainly not an adventurer that existed in the '30s.)

When I was nine that focus inevitably shifted to the field of paleontology (this is invariably true for any other impressionable youth that happened to catch a certain movie in the summer of '93.) Yes, I was to be a paleontologist. But not the boring kind that sits on a patch of dirt all day dusting sand off of rocks with a tiny brush. No, I'd be the kind of paleontologist that would inevitably get called to an island paradise theme park, because the particularities of said theme park happened to be in sync with my field of expertise. I'm sure you can fill in what happens after.

So I guess the point I'm getting at, and the reason why watching Raiders of the Lost Ark on a Saturday evening wound up bumming the fuck out of me, is that children tend to idealize, romanticize and glorify concepts that they become enthralled with for whatever reason. While the media that planted those seeds was already presenting an overblown hyper-contextualized version of the initial idea, it is us as wildly imaginative kids filled with awe and wonder that run with that idea and make it truly all-encompassing. Now this presents a few problems. The two main ones being that a) you eventually realize that becoming that thing you so desperately want to become requires inordinate amounts of work, chance and time (you may subtract the element of chance if you're one of those 'you can do anything if you really want it' people) or b)that the actual idea (job or field of work in this case..) really isn't as great as the glorified conception of it you had in your head at some point. Now I'm certainly not elucidating any new theory on the child mind or anything of the sort, but here's the thing: I've been worrying a lot lately that I, a 25 year old guy, still hold certain vestiges of that mentality.

Ugh. It's getting late and I'm rambling again. I'll continue with this thought tomorrow or sometime soon. Right now I should get some rest. I start a new café job tomorrow morning that certainly won't be as exciting as I had initially made café jobs out to be in my head. Again, ugh.

listening : sonny rollins - saxophone colossus
reading : miles - miles davis' autobiography