The Coolest Job Ever

NaBloPoMo BlogHer Prompt: What did you think was the coolest job in the world when you were younger? Do you still feel that way now?

The coolest job in the world was being a Spice Girl. It couldn’t get any better than that. They were the closest thing to superheroes in my mind. Think about it. You get to travel all over the world, with you best friends I might add, promoting girl power! You get to wear cool clothes and sing and dance all day. Plus, you have your very own double decker bus to drive around on. That was cool!

I will always be a Spice Girls fan and would definitely buy a ticket if they were to have a concert around here, but I would not want to be one. The awesome parts of their jobs I mentioned above are still pretty cool, but that is not all they did. They were celebrities. As one of those, especially at the level the Spice Girls were at, your job is your life, your life is your job. It’s all the same. You have to be “on” all the time. As an introvert with depression, that would probably be my worst nightmare.

Celebrities get all sorts of criticism for everything they do. Their choices are criticized, their words, their clothes, their bodies. Sometimes it is constructive criticism, sometimes they do something dumb and are asking for it, but a lot of the time it is just plain mean. Tabloids were pretty bad when the Spice Girls were in their prime, but those gossip newspapers don’t even compare to what we have now; social media. I think having all those negative things said about me on social media would be crushing. It wouldn’t matter how well I was doing or how many good things were said, the haters would win.

Now that I have a better understanding of what being a Spice Girl might have been like, there is no way I would want to be one. I admire them for being able to handle it though.

#NaBloPoMo – When Barbie Went Digital

NaBloPoMo Blog Her prompt: What was the one toy that a friend had that you wished you had when you were little?

I met Melissa the very first day of kindergarten. We were best buddies through grade school. We are still friends today. I see her every time I go back to Toronto for a visit.

Growing up, she had everything. We would play in her basement playroom where one wall was floor to ceiling shelves of toys and games. She had an older brother, I have no idea where his toys were kept because these shelves were all Melissa’s things.

Melissa was the first to have the baby dolls that you could actually feed and have to change the diaper. She had the cool board games that incorporated VHS tapes. She also had Barbie Fashion Designer. She was the only one of us who had it, so of course we all wanted to play whenever we were over at her house. She must have been getting sick of it.

I have always liked designing clothes. Just the drawing part though, I couldn’t sew a bag if my life depended on it. I loved to draw and I would draw characters in all sorts of outfits.

Barbie Fashion Designer was a computer program that came out right around the same time as CD-ROM. It was great because you got to pick the type of clothes, you got to design the fabric and then Barbie would model the outfit you created in 3D. That was my favourite part, seeing what it looked like on Barbie. The software even went a step further and allowed you to print the outfit on specialized fabric-paper so one of your own Barbies could wear your creation.

Melissa let me print one once. It was kind of flimsy. It kept falling off and didn’t fit my Barbie nearly as well as it did the digital Barbie. That part was a little disappointing, but I didn’t care. It was all about the design and seeing digital Barbie wear it for me.

My parents never bought the computer program for me. I was getting to the age where Barbies were no longer considered cool. They figured there was no sense in buying it and then having me lose interest. Little did they know, I was the type of kid who didn’t pay attention to what wasn’t cool!

In fact, I am so uncool that I got a brand new Barbie just this week! Hubby did the groceries and came back with this for me. She is still in the box because I haven’t decided if I should keep her, or give her to one of my nieces.

Yup, that is Scientist Barbie! The back of the box says “Scientists study oceans, space, the Earth & even animals!”. She comes fully equipped with her lab coat, lab safety goggles and a microscope.

Although it is very cool that Barbie is showing an interest in science now, she’s not quite there yet.

Those legs! Those Shoes! Clearly a safety code violation!

Good job Barbie, you’ll get there one day.

Trying NaBloPoMo

Why not right? So many of you are doing NaNoWriMo, I’m feeling like I am missing out. I can’t handle a novel at this point in time. I’ve got a grant deadline in early December, so that is where all my writing should be going. I don’t think I could write a novel anyway. Blog posts are more my speed and what better way to get back into the habit of writing, right?

Actually, I should have been a little less impulsive in signing up yesterday. Considering this is the 4th post since I went MIA 7 months ago, this may be too big a commitment. I want to be writing again, but I am still having trouble managing depression. I was really looking forward to doing A-Z last April. I even prepared ahead of time! It didn’t matter though. Depression took over and it was a spectacular flop. At least it was spectacular right?! Glass half full. 🙂

Since this whole thing started yesterday, Halloween (I must have been possessed), I have no idea what I am doing. I did sign up at BlogHer, so I will probably be using the prompts over there most of the time. Outside of that, I’ll babble about depression, grad school and life in general. Sometimes the scientist in me just has to share something cool I learned. That has been rare in the last while since I am mad at my Ph.D. and everything related to it. Maybe I’ll try to doodle again, no promises though!

NaBloPoMo is really hard to write without typos. Does anybody say that out loud? I keep messing it up when I try to say it.

I will leave you with Ewok’s discovery of the Lego Express.

Happy NaBloPoMo everybody!