Tornado Gardens Champion (Kinect Sports)

When I was a child, I wanted to be a detective. I liked watching mysteries with my dad. If I could guess who the killer was correctly, without changing my mind too many times, it impressed my dad. Detectives solved problems and led exciting lives.

When I was a child I wanted to be a comedian. I liked watching stand-up comedy and funny movies with my dad. My dad had a reverence for comedians. My dad could make anyone laugh, but he knew he couldn't perform for an audience. I would study the jokes he told and he'd tell me how you gauge someone's sense of humor and tailor your jokes for your audience.

When I was a child I wanted to be a movie critic. I read Roger Ebert's 1992 Video Home Companion from cover to cover. I loved watching movies with my dad. When I turned 8, he decided that that was old enough to watch anything. Even younger than that, there wasn't much that he thought to shield me from, besides boobs, which I wasn't allowed to look at. He watched kid movies with me, but he would rather watch adult movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas, or Straw Dogs and try to teach me about the world. I tried to soak up the movies, soak up his lessons, but I didn't really understand.

When I was a child I wanted to be a writer. I had a hand-me-down typewriter in my room that I would use to make lists, write raps and stories.

I wrote a horror story when I was very young about a group of friends that encountered a monster in the woods. I don't remember much about it. I remember it had a bad ending, where everybody died. I thought that was much more interesting than a happy ending. I remember, as the group of friends are running away, the monster catches one and eats his tongue. I read that sentence over and over again, shocked that I had the capability to put such a graphic image on a piece of paper. I also felt the image had a peculiar sexual power, but I was too young to understand that, only that the word tongue in a violent act had the power to make me feel something electric.

I gave it to my dad to critique and he made copies of it, sent it out to all his friends. I felt betrayed and powerfully embarrassed. I didn't write anything again for years.

I work in IT now. It was something I never had much of an inclination for that I found myself wondering if I could do. Now that I've discovered the answer to that question, the biggest surprise is realizing everyone around me had already answered it for me way before I did for myself. And the feeling that decades of other paths and possibilities only existed in my own mind.

But reality as defined through the eyes of other people is fickle and malleable. It may take some convincing and active participation, but people will believe whatever you want them to believe.