When I went looking for some intro music for my history podcast last year, my grad student friend RJohn Williams willingly allowed me to copy some chunks out of his band’s song “I Fell off My Name.” Whenever I hear this song now, I get a little thrill, because it’s “my song,” too–I’ve listened to it over and over and over again as I’ve mixed my podcast tracks.
On Saturday night I watched Faded Paper Figures play their first-ever live gig. It was a lot of fun to see RJohn behind the mic, when I’m used to seeing him in grad student mode. Faded Paper Figures seems to be doing quite well, and I suspect that RJohn might have a career as a rockstar rather than as a professor (although why not do both, right?).
Therefore, this week’s giveaway is a copy of FPF’s new CD, “Dynamo.” If you’d like to be entered in the drawing, please leave a comment below telling me what your dream career is: rockstar, artist, novelist, lion tamer, etc.
Me, my dream career would be to be the next Studs Terkel. I love hearing people tell their life stories. Interviewing historians for my podcast is such fun, as is my time spent in the archives reading centuries-old letters and journals of people who are long dead, but continue to live on through the written word.
36 comments
My dream would be to be like Leonardo DaVinci-scientist, artist, inventor…I want it all. My family is the most important thing to me, though, and I consider myself very lucky.
I want to be an author who spends her free time taking random classes like stained glass and archery.
I would like to know and study languages. So probably a translator would be a fun job to me.
Well, I would love to be a mother, but I would also love to bring history to life for people of all ages. I entered grad school with the dream of starting a living history site where people could experience the education of different time periods. Although that is not a possibility at this time, I still think it would be awesome!
I would like to be a 19th Century Daguerriean – making Daguerreotype occupational portraits. And because it’s a dream, I’ll go ahead and be a man because I can wear natty suits with top hats and go out by myself at nighttime and smoke pipes and drink scotch after a hard days work getting mercury poisoning.
I want to be a marksman…
oh my goodness, i have stopped fantasizing about a dream career and started realizing what careers will actually work for me.
i used to dream about being an artist, gallery owner, photographer, stay at home mom.
Jana…I agree completely that Studs Turkel has one of the greatest jobs in the world. He really is an anthropologist/sociologist as well as an historian, so doing what he does would be right up my alley.
However, I’ve always harbored this fantasy of having an overnight radio show, which probably comes from my misspent youth laying in bed after bedtime with my transistor radio (who’s old enough to remember those?) plastered to my ear, listening to talk, music, news, anything I could find. I even took a couple of radio courses at Reedley College, years ago, but that was at the time of my life when I was in process of discovering that I am more of a writer and less of a talker. Still, it would be such fun.
Elaine
my dream career is photographing love and people and beauty while spinning words into lines of joyous refrain. i would also like to go back to teaching in some capacity and … see the problem is i could go on and on, so many dreams. i also want to make documentaries about issues that i am passionate about, like homelessness and the environment.
My dream is to be a designer, but with no limits.
Okay so my dream dream job would be to be a food critic of course, but other than that I’d really like to work in a field that promote environmental responsibility the saving of our planet, which is why I am going back to school.
But seriously- if someone offered me the food critic position I’d be there in a heart beat.
I already have a copy of this CD and I would just like to say that I LOVE it.
I don’t have a dream job right now. It’s all I can do to enjoy moments of my current job. I have been trying to think of what field to study next, though, so I can go back to school in 3 years. I think one of my dream jobs would be forensic anthropologist a la Kathy Reichs. But I don’t know if I could handle it. I love solving puzzles. But I’m boring. My neighbor said she could see me as a librarian.
I’d love to be a writer, either a genius-type like Roth or McCarthy or a hip, young pop-culture-influenced writer like D.F. Wallace, Hornby, Eggers, etc.
That, or a poet/musician like Conor Oberst, Mark Oliver Everett (Eels), Morrissey, Matt Johnson, Stephen Duffy, Neil Young, Win Butler (Arcade Fire), James Mercer (Shins) etc.
If either of those failed, I’d be happy being the color commentator for the L.A. Lakers.
If R. John Williams reads this, I wonder if he has heard Casiotone for the Painfully Alone?
Oh, how fun to get to write down in actual words my dream career!! Well, I’m a nurse now which I love, but I would love to be an author, not just any author, I want to sit down with this computer and have absolutely effortless prose pour out of me that would thrill everyone who picked up my books and dove in. Well, you did say “dream career”! I figure if I get to pick my dream career it should be a BIG dream.;)
Melissa
Lissamom2@aol.com
“rockstar, artist, novelist, lion tamer, etc.”
aw dang! you took all mine!
artist, writer, or musician… those are my top three (and lion tamer… well hell, that sounds great too.)
specifically; it would be cool to write and illustrate graphic novels (Marjane Satrapi is amazing), or be as good a sci-fi writer as Octavia Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin. Being a working artist has always been my goal and the focus of my higher education… sadly, it is starting to look more and more like a fantasy. but it’s still there, one of my goals.
and I would love love LOVE to be a singer/songwriter… on par with Ani DiFranco or Brandi Carlile or Amy Macdonald. oooohhhhh! that would be awesome!
1st: sound engineer. my childhood dreamjob.
i wanna be the voice behind phone prompts or bus announcements. :)
I loved being a college radio DJ–if I could have Nic Harcourt’s job at KCRW, that would be cool. And I’d even play this CD if I won it. Or, more likely, I’ll just add the tracks to various intricately assembled iTunes playlists that only I ever hear…
I have my dream job as a special education teacher. It is my dream job if I “have” to work. I have holidays every few months throughout the year. Weekends off. Five and half hour days. Couldn’t be better unless I was retired and independently wealthy.
I would pick colours for people to make them happy. I would tell them to buy shocking pink raw silk cushions for their house, or a cornflower blue dress, or a red lipstick. Colour Lady would be my title :)
That’s a toughie. I wanted to be a little of everything when I was younger. Now I would love to go back into performance. There was always something magical about connecting with other people onstage. It was very soulful- not in a James Brown sort of way but a being close to humanity sort of way.
However, owning a book/stationery store would be the bee’s knees.
I would love to be a children’s author and illustrator, where I would focus on nature themes and special needs kids, pairing the world’s diversity with humanity’s motley bunch. I would encourage my young readers to be curious about every part of life and the world.
My dream career would be to take over Samantha Brown’s job on the Travel Channel. Not only does she get to experience the most amazing places, she gets to see things that most of us would never get to see. I love the fact that she takes the time to explore destinations that are close to home and more exotic. I couldn’t imagine getting to see all of those places in one lifetime.
After I read this post yesterday, I grabbed a paper and pencil, and started making a list of my dream jobs. Now, I have lost my list. Let me see if I can reconstruct it:
Freelance menu and puzzle editor
detective
singer/songwriter
movie star
Willy Wonka
carpenter
full-time student
It’s a work in progress.
I want to teach. Either elementary school or high school literature. I figured out what I wanted to be the last semester of my senior year of college and decided it was “too late”. I know I could always go back to school. I’m only 30. I know I’ll never truly be satisfied with my career life until I’m teaching and yet, I have a sneaking suspicion that life is going to get in the way and I’ll never make it happen.
Thanks for the great post, Jana!
Hey Matt, I will definitely check out Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Coolest band name ever, by the way.
I guess one of my dreams is to become enough of a rockstar that we at least get rid of the 1500 CDs in our closet right now.
My dream career:
Teach German as a second language, and teach German phonology, morphology and syntax. Own a restaurant in which I am the menu/recipe developer. Do interior design. Landscape/Garden. Own a farm where I grow organic foods. Photographer.
That is my dream career.
Running a tuition-free private school for urban middle & high school girls. Give me time . . . :)
Faded Paper Figures! A friend recommended them to me, and after visiting their Myspace page I was totally going to go buy their CD but… didn’t for some reason? Can’t remember why. Maybe sudden poverty or something.
In any case, my dream career is to be a public librarian during the day in a big city library where I get to help a diverse, polyglot clientele and use the various languages that I learned at one point and am inexorably forgetting, and by night I would write bestselling fantasy novels.
I am doing what I love: I am an artist, a gardener, a chicken owner, a homeschooling mom, living on 22 acres with assorted small animals. It is all good.
A stand up comedian/poet. I would stand on stage and do comedy that turned into poetry, so people could laugh and cry as much as they need to.
My dream career would be to own and run a tea room and bookstore. It’s not a combination I’ve ever seen before, but is somewhere I would to create and spend my days.
Maura:
I’ve always wanted to this, too! with big overstuffed chairs, etc. My teahouse/bookshop will have a resident black cat, too.
I don’t know where you live, but if you ever find yourself in Salt Lake City, you should check out the Beehive Tearoom. It has some books (though they aren’t for sale) and it terrifically cozy and charming (in a victorian gothic meets Amelie sort of way).
:)
I’m already a middle school teacher and I love it, but the dream portion of the job would be if we had no financial restrictions and could travel anywhere we wanted to experience other cultures, to experience history (or at least see historical places).
I'd love to be a costumer! First I'd need to acquire the sewing, tailoring & other construction skills, but when I go to any kind of performance, I love examining the costumes, their construction, the materials. When my husband once treated me to tickets for Phantom on Broadway, I was dying to charge the stage to check out the costumes on the dancers in the opening scene. :D
I'm fortunate to know a professional costumer (she designs patterns for a major pattern company, inter alia) who has sewn for the Metropolitan Opera, circuses, theater companies and I don't know who-all else. I would dearly love to apprentice with her and cram some of her knowledge & experience into my head. I've done some very rudimentary costuming and really enjoy making people look good on stage. It would be such a source of pride to have them wearing things that make a good overall stage picture, suit their character, enhance whatever they're doing (singing, dancing, making extravagant gestures) – making magic, I call it!