Something Prompted Me To Write This....

NaBloPoMo Post #8

It was a Daily Writing Prompt

I'm still feeling pretty rotten today, like my head is trying to roll off my shoulders. I don't have enough brain power to write what I had planned to write, so I'm cheating and using a writing prompt. (Also, my desktop is running very, very slowly, and Andrew borrowed my laptop.)

Hey, it was either that or a cute kitten video!

Actually since I started looking at the writing prompts for November on Blogher, I feel like I might use some of them again through the month and not feel like I'm cheating. Some of them are really interesting questions upon which to build a blog post. 

The prompt I chose was this: What did you think was the coolest job in the world when you were younger? Do you still feel that way?

I honestly can't remember ever thinking that one job was the "coolest." I know I became interested in writing in one form or another when I was about 14. By the time I was a Junior in high school I knew I wanted to work for a newspaper at least for a part of my life -- and I did.

But when I was really young, there were two things that I can remember being interested in enough that I read about them or used them in my pretend play. One of them was police officer.  When I was a first-grader I checked a book out of the library about police officers. It wasn't very big, and the binding was blue. The text was simple enough, and it was probably written for a higher grade-level, but thanks to my sister Barbara I was already reading at a third- or fourth-grade level.

All I really remember about the book was that it was blue and there were simple drawings accompanying the text. It explained how police officers went to police academies, and it told what they're duties were. And some of the drawings were of female police officers. I think that might be what attracted me; I don't know. For a year maybe, I wanted to be a policewoman.

In the second grade I announced that I was going to be a scientist. I wore a white lab coat (probably someone's dress shirt) and I carried a notebook and pencil with me everywhere. In my pretend play I was a "scientist" working on experiments and making notes about them. That's all I remember about that except that my sister Barbara asked me why I wanted to be a scientist, and I said because I liked to write things down and keep records of things. I can remember that like it was yesterday. She laughed at me (she was 6 years older), and said there was more to being a scientist than that. I wonder if I had read a book about a scientist or if in school we'd done some elementary experiments and had to write down our observations or something. Or maybe we had a text book that showed a scientist with a white lab coat, making notes or something. I don't know, but it was very appealing to me.

Of course, in real life, I was not that great at math or science but excelled in English and literature. But I do still like to keep neat, complete records of just about everything, and I do write down my observations. :) 

Other things I liked to pretend to be in play were forest ranger, detective, and newspaper reporter. And all three of those required taking notes and keeping records, didn't they? Hmm.

Anyway, I'm off to bed now. I'm going to baby this cold and hope it doesn't get worse, and I'm going to baby this computer and hope it doesn't require getting wiped -- but it looks like it's heading in that direction. It keeps freezing up on me! Oh well! Maybe we'll both be feeling better tomorrow.

In the meantime, happy blogging!

~ ~ Lori