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When I Grow Up Posting Date: Nov 4 2007 9:55PM When I grow up, I want to be a scientist. I asked dad about it and he said that being a good scientist is hard work because scientists invent things like plastic, computers, moon rocks and digital watches.
Personally, I don’t see what the big hairy deal is. I already have the white coat, which my Aunt Petunia got me for Christmas two years ago. It’s actually more of a sandy colour and it’s mostly a coat for outside, but I use it as my scientist coat because you can’t really be scientist if you’re wearing a bomber jacket with fake fur trim. You get hot and you get sweaty and then you don’t want to be a scientist anymore because you’re damp.
It probably takes a lot of effort to invent something, especially something good like say, television or maybe Pop Rocks which are probably made of just about every space-age material there is. Pop Rocks are awesome. My friend Manfred, who has a really square-looking head, by the way, says that if you fill your whole mouth with Pop Rocks and then drink a warm Coke really fast, the chemical reaction will kill you.
At first I didn’t believe Manfred because he has a square head and he never pays attention in class, so what does he know? But then I thought about it – my dad would call that “considering the evidence,” which is what good scientists do – and I figured out what Manfred was talking about. I think there’s a reaction with Coke and the bubbles and the fizziosity from the Pop Rocks and maybe it makes, like, carbon dioxide which I read once is like air but not breathable. Anyway, if all your air got replaced by carbon dioxide, you’d die, so maybe that’s what happens.
So now I have a new policy – I never have Pop Rocks and Coke at the same time, just to be safe.
Because I wanted to invent something new, I needed an idea of what was already invented, so I started looking through the encyclopedia. A whole lot of things, it turns out, have already been invented, which sucks. Being a scientist, like back in the 1800’s must have been super-easy because you could just sit around and invent the obvious stuff like staplers and reflective tape. Now, if you come up with the idea for something good like spring-loaded shoes or a talking GI Joe doll, it’s already been invented, so really, you accomplished pretty much squat.
So what I did was I started making a list of things that had been invented already so if I came up with an invention of my own, I could check against the list before I spent too much time on it. It’s a good thing, too, because right after I did that, I invented a hat that you can drink out of and I had no clue that it was already a thing because I’m just a kid and usually those hats are for cans of beer and where am I going to get a can of beer?
After that, I kind of stopped wanting to be a scientist because it really seemed to be pretty much impossible to come up with something that no one has ever thought of making before.
I asked mom if there was an easier job I could have because being a scientist was so tough and she said there were definitely jobs like that, but I could be a scientist if I wanted because when I grow up, I’m going to be so smart that university will teach me every invention ever and that way I’ll know what not to invent. I had forgotten that things worked that way, with university teaching you everything, so I was glad mom mentioned it.
I won’t go to university for about ten years unless I start skipping grades, and mom’s not a big fan of that because then you’re always the smallest kid in the class and mom says “it stunts your social development” and I don’t want to be stunted, I just want to be a scientist, but that’s tough. Maybe I’ll just be an astronaut.
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