Unrealistic Childhood Crap

Bit of advice: it's a long read, but you should read it all in one go for best effect.

Now, we all had our dreams and fantasies as children. Typically you'd ask a little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he'd say he wanted to be a policeman. You'd ask a little girl, she'd say she wanted to be a doctor.

But not me. Oh, no. I wanted to be a paleontologist.
And here's the kicker..
that's not a joke.

I wasn't pampered as a kid. My parents spoiled me AFTER I reached adulthood. In stark contrast, my  childhood was ghetto. I used to spend my days playing around with janitors' kids in a nursery right in front of our first story hut back at Siko Siko village.. damn it, I was THIS close to selling this..

Alright, alright... How about this:

I had to shepherd my dad's sheep herds in Sinai and he didn't have money to buy a shepherd dog to help me, and I was the actual kid who cried out "wolf" but people keep forgetting that I didn't have a dog to ward them off and the wolves really did keep eating my sheep bit by bit till they dwindled and dad made up this totally lame-ass story to cover up my failure?

Nope. Doesn't work either.

No, seriously, as a kid I didn't have that many toys to play with and my only playmate was my unwilling sister. When she was a baby, I made sure to show her that even though she could come along with her little fingers and small socks and swollen baby cheeks, I was still Sheriff of Bedroom town, Bondok county, Texas. After years of eye-poking, pesticide-spraying, punching, toy-disposal and other forms of Bondok justice, she knew who was boss. When I suggested we play with my Batman action figures, she knew who had to be Robin. When I wanted a girl for my Batman, she had to give me her best doll, or else. I was bad-ass like that...

So yeah, my toys weren't always new and I had to improvise a lot. Now don't get me wrong, this isn't the True Hollywood Success Story, we did have Batmobiles and stuff, but if you're at home for a 3-month holiday where you play the same geeky game everyday with your sister who wants to go groom her stupid dolls, you have to be creative to spice it up, you know? For example, I had this small red Jaguar model car I'd bought on my first trip to London, and I just HAD to find a way to make batman the action figure fit in there. Dilemma, right? Wrong. By ingeniously merging the worlds of Pokemon and bored kid at home with nothing to do, I was able to create the great shape-shifting Batman! Now he could evolve (at will) into one of the little Lego men I had and then he could drive the Jag... Inspired much? I know.

Also, Batman's girl had to be abducted by aliens at least twice a week; kidnapped by evil Plasticine enemies especially engineered by yours truly to look as hideous as can be and have patches of their faces missing (sometimes they didn't have any features); she had to drown on a daily basis or to faint somewhere where Batman can't find her and has to look for her the whole day (that was when we couldn't find the doll in real life and  had to find some way to patch it up). She basically existed to be the stereotypical damsel in distress.

It's safe to say that my imagination was.. fertile. I actually believed the babies-are-delivered-by-storks story, that clouds were made of cotton, that the moon was made of cheese. Also, I thought people in old movies were ACTUALLY black and white, and my personal favorite; that people liked their breath condensing in front of their faces in winter so much that when the summer came along, they just had to smoke cigarettes so they can play with the pretty fumes. My theory failed to explain why they smoke more in winter though.

Now, I know all of this is irrelevant to why I wanted to be a paleontologist,  but did you think a kid whose head was so messed up was going to give you a nice little "I want to be a policeman when I grow up?"
 He-yell no.
Of course, back then I used the term "dinosaur scientist" instead of paleontologist.

Needless to say, my parents' reaction to my imagination was amusing. Mom resorted to giving me nightmares by telling me stories of Armageddon and Gog and Magog for bedtime stories (Seriously. Not kidding). She also told me that  Santa didn't exist and that tooth fairies were a lot hairier than I'd made them out to be and they went by the name "Magdy Rezk Bondok", who replaced my teeth with 10-pound bills while I slept. Dad, however, went right to the point. He told me "dinosaur scientists" eat dust and die hungry. So then I wanted to be an astronomer, and he told me to drill some air holes in my skull because apparently my brain wasn't sufficiently ventilated and was therefore overheating.

I love my parents. It's a wonder I didn't grow up to be a cynical atheist, though.

It might not look like I have much of a point and that I'm just firing away random funny facts about my childhood, but all of this was leading up to a point;

Could it be that I'm in Petroleum Engineering because it's the closest Engineering major to Geology and that maybe, even once every 12 Petroleum courses, the word fossil turns up and I can get lost in moments of forgotten childhood? I think so. We all have our little dreams and hopes as kids that we let go of gradually as we grow up and lose our innocence. We all try as hard as we can to hold on to that little bit of who we were as children, innocent and care-free and ignorant of the real challenges and requirements of materialistic life. Even though this blog entry is called "Unrealistic Childhood Crap", I think each and every one of us holds on to a little bit of their childhood when they grow up, if not consciously then at least at some subconscious level. Even if it means majoring in a field that's close enough to the magical world of dinosaurs to allow you to face that little child in you and tell him:

 "Well done, kid. You're a dinosaur scientist".