Let's Talk About Your Future...and Badgers

If you're under the age of twenty, you probably spend a fair amount of time thinking about what the future has in store for you. College? Career? World travel and a brief stint in the circus? Hey, the possibilities are endless, and they can be fun to think about... that is, until some humorless, slightly wrinkled adult makes you sit down and talk about it in the most un-fun way possible.

“So, Walter,” he says, looking solemnly at you over his greasy bifocals.“What do you want to study in school? What are your career goals? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

We at SparkNotes have always hated this series of questions, especially because there are only, like, three possible answers that won't cause the other person to look at you like you've just sprouted a second head. (For the record, “I want to be a rodeo clown!” is not one of those three.) But now we know that there's an easy way to admit your weirdest aspirations: by combining them with a legitimate-sounding future goal that will lull the question-asker into submission before walloping him on the head with a giant lump of CRAZY. So before you start settling for a less-than-wild dream, when someone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, consider one of these answers:

I want to be a lawyer... for the Russian mafia.
I want to teach Spanish...to badgers.
I'm going to design buildings...made entirely of butter.
I plan to study insects... after dressing them up in tiny outfits which I will sew by hand.
I'm going to be a dentist...on Mars.
I'll become an equal rights activist...for one-legged clowns.
I'll become a doctor and perform organ transplants...on your mom.
I want to run an investment firm...catering to talking walnuts.

As for us, we're starting a bike messenger service...staffed entirely by nudists. What do YOU want to be when you grow up?