Childhood Dreams

So I’m going to talk about balloon boy like everybody else in the world. It’s kind of cool to think about. Not really anymore because we all know it’s a hoax & now his parents are going to jail. But if you just look at the idea, I think it’s pretty darn cool. The movie up just came out (which I wish I could’ve seen) and it kind of ads to this storyline. That also makes me wonder if that’s where his dad got the idea from. But anyways, it’s kind of like a childhood fantasy, to just float away in a balloon. I think it was a few years ago that a man actually did float away in his lawn chair. He was middle aged & just decided one day that he wanted to float away. I think everybody feels like that sometimes. You’re having problems with school or the significant other or your friends and you just sometimes want to float away. And it would be amazing to be up there amongst the clouds, your mind just completely free from worries. It seems like you could just lay back, relax, & stare at the clouds. But now I’m thinking about the practical side. You are however many feet up in the air & if a bird comes along & pops all of your balloons, you’re a goner. So it’s pretty dangerous. I am too scared to get on a roller coaster so I know I could never actually do this. If there were some safer way to, I guess I would. But I guess the safer way is called an airplane. And people still die if that crashes. Maybe people just aren’t destined to be up in the air. If we were I think we would have wings. That kind of shows that people are always trying to do things that maybe they just weren’t meant to do. For example, tear down the rainforest. How selfish of a human being do you have to be to tear down what little of the rain forests that we have left? I mean seriously, is your money worth killing hundreds of animals & trees? I think not. Nothing that you are going to do with that land is that important, especially if you’re going to build some polluting the factory that’s just going to kill the environment even more. Some people fail to understand that they are harming the world around them, that they have to live in. Some people say it doesn’t affect them personally but yeah, it does. But nobody realizes it until they get some lung disease or some other bad disease from all the toxins that they breathe in. Nobody ever cares until it’s too late, which is so sad. Can you imagine getting all the way up to the sky in your ballooncopter & then not being able to see anything because of all the air pollution? Or coming back down to earth & not having fresh drinking water because it’s filled with toxins? These are the realities that we face now because a select group of people do not care about their impact on the world. They think that the only way that they can have an impact is if they build thousands of factories or have lots of buildings with their names on it. But that’s not the type of impact that I would want to have on the world. I would not want to be responsible for ruining the world. Oh no, I don’t want that on my shoulders. I am comfortable just knowing that I’m making an impact by making simple changes in my life. I always recycle, try to take shorter showers, & turn the water off when brushing my teeth. These things are so small but just imagine if everybody did them? The world would be such a different place. Heck, I’m paying thousands of dollars to go to school just so I’ll learn how to make an impact on the environment. I’m paying all this money just to work for the EPA or some other government agency. Sorry, I really didn’t mean to go off on some environmental tangent!
Anyways, what the up story reminded me of was what my childhood dreams were. At first I wanted to be an orthodontist. This is very weird, I know. But I got braces when I was like 7 so that’s practically the only job I knew. That lasted for a little while but the real thing that I spent most of my childhood wanting to do is to be a storm chaser! I have always wanted to chase tornados! It just seems like so much fun to me! The thrill of trying to find the storm & then watching it develop sound absolutely amazing to me. And I was so serious about this up until second semester of my senior year in high school. I applied to the University of Oklahoma, the best meteorological school in the country. I was even accepted into their meteorological school. My mom paid for us to go & visit the campus since I was seriously considering going out there. The only reason I am at Virginia Tech is because Oklahoma was too far away & out of state tuition is way too much! I am currently researching summer internships where I could get some exposure to storms! And I didn’t want to be one of those fake weather people like on television. No, I wanted to be one of the real ones out in the field. But this was a blessing in disguise, because while at Virginia Tech, I have discovered that I absolutely hate science. I hate science so much that I am switching out of a science major for something I enjoy more, the policy & politics side of saving the environment. This just goes to show you that what you want when you’re little is not necessarily what you want now. And what you want now is probably not what you’re going to want when you’re 45. That’s all folks!