What's Your Dream
What is your dream in life? What do you hope to accomplish? Come on; tell me. It can be anything in the world, anything you can possibly think of. It is probably best to choose something fairly realistic because if you choose something too hard to obtain, your life will be one giant endless chase. Unless of course you achieve your dream, because then, good for you, hotshot. My dream is to be a professional comedian (you see, pick something realistic and achievable). My dream is to write movies where the bad guys end up dead, the good guy gets the girl, and the audience laughs throughout the whole thing. I am going to achieve my dream and there is nothing you can do to stop me, besides maybe putting a bullet in my head or force-feeding me any item from the nut family.
I have the whole dream mapped out and there are steps I need to fulfill before I can accomplish my overall goal. First, I will graduate Hotchkiss. My parents think that should be my whole dream. It is just the right amount of realistic they say. “Just finish Hotchkiss, Jasper. And then, anything you do after that will not matter at all! You could do anything you want, with no internal guide whatsoever.” That life is not for me I say. I think that life is one full of solitude, depression, and addiction. Way too real, if you ask me. Next, after I graduate Hotchkiss, I will drop out of whatever college I attend to join the ranks at the prestigious show Saturday Night Live. This is where I will make my name. The world will fall in love with Jasper Morris once I say those magic words for the first time: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” This, some might say, is the most challenging part of my dream, but you have to remember, it is not about how good you are at what you do, but who you know and who you are sleeping with. I don’t think I’m Lorne Michaels’ type, so hopefully I know somebody.
Once I am on SNL for, I don’t know, five seasons, I will leave and have the entertainment world in the palm of my hand. Everyone will want to work with the Jasper Morris and my career will take off. I will write hit movie after hit movie and win Oscar after Oscar, I will join the ranks of brilliant minds that came before me. I will stick my tongue into the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I will perform a personal rendition of Michael Jackson’s “We Are The World” at the Grammy’s. I will be remembered for generations to come and young children will aspire to be like me one day.
But my dream does not stop there because that, I declare, is too accomplishable; I need a challenge. After I achieve all this, and only after I gain international stardom, I will disappear at the height of my career. I will vanish. No one will know where I went or if I’m dead or if I’m just hiding on some remote island in Hawaii. They will look, but to no avail. I will be gone. Finally, after about ten years or so of this, I will return, but only as a contributing writer, and an occasional cartoonist, for the illustrious magazine The New Yorker. But by this point, the world will have forgotten about me, forgotten about what I accomplished during my amazing career. But that will be the best part. Once everyone forgets about the fame, once you are a “has-been”, that is when you gain total privacy, complete peace, and eternal serenity. Of course, it all depends on if you still have all the money you made while famous. It would be terrible to be a poor “has-been”. What would you do for fun? Read? Hah. That would be terrible. This part of my career I will enjoy until I cannot enjoy any more fun.
And then following this point in my career, I will retire and die, leaving behind all my belongings to be donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I will give my body to science, so that they could figure out everything that had to go right for my one-of-a-kind mind to be created, because I, and the world, need answers. This is end of my dream, and hopefully my life.
Readers, I urge you, do not listen to me because I am a sixteen-year-old boy pretending to know what he is talking about. Do not listen to me because I believe all of these things will happen. Do not listen to me because I picked a realistic dream. Listen to me because any dream is palpable if you make it palpable. Work and work and work some more, and keep dreaming throughout it all and maybe one day you’ll be on SNL too. Maybe you will even perform a personal rendition of “We Are The World” at the Grammy’s too. Actually, maybe not, we all can’t be me. Pick your own dream and stop stealing other peoples’. Remember, make your dream realistic, and by that I mean, entirely impossible.
PC: Hannah Xu
