AISLING MCCREA (CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AND PODMASTER GENERAL): One of my weaknesses is that I have really bad spatial intelligence, which makes it hard for me to understand how the Earth works in relation to seasons, time zones, day versus night, etc. Like I still don’t really understand why you always see the sun in the day and the moon at night. Please don’t try and explain it to me, people have tried. I can’t see it, visually. Anyway, when I was a kid I wanted to work for NASA.

SPARKY ABRAHAM (FINANCE EDITOR): Not too late!

MCCREA: Actually it was part-time NASA scientist, part-time concert pianist. (Cue Vanessa saying “oh actually I was a part-time NASA scientist and part-time concert pianist once!”)

ABRAHAM: I wanted to be a paleontological entomologist. I wanted to study dinosaur bugs but also liked feeling smart by saying big words.

VANESSA A. BEE (ASSOCIATE EDITOR): I wanted to be a pediatrician from age 7 to freshman year of college.

BRIANNA RENNIX (SENIOR EDITOR): That’s a long time!! What changed?

BEE: Mmm, the basic courses. I enjoyed the math of chemistry but strongly disliked biology. It felt too…hypothetical to have to imagine these things that I knew existed but could not see. Also felt like it required more memorizing than active problem solving, which bored me. (Also I was a mediocre biology student.) What did you wish to be, Ms. Rennix?

RENNIX: Fiction writer pretty consistently from ages about 6 to 21…when I was small I also wanted to double up as a detective, chemist, or wildlife biologist.

LYTA GOLD (AMUSEMENTS AND MANAGING EDITOR): I wanted all the kid careers: astronaut, paleontologist, archaeologist. But at 10 I decided I wanted to write fiction and that’s never changed. Would still kind of like to be a part-time archaeologist. It’s hard to get funding for that.

ABRAHAM: Lyta can we start a not-so-Current Affairs wholly about dinosaurs? 

RENNIX: Cretaceous Affairs.

GOLD: Breaking dinosaur news…with our usual timeliness.

OREN NIMNI (LEGAL EDITOR AND INTERNET HEARTTHROB): When I was little I wanted to be a paleontologist. Then a “scientist” or robotics person. Then from high school to sophomore year in uni I wanted to do genetics research and got deep into it. Then I abandoned all that.

RENNIX: “Then I abandoned all that” is always the beginning of a legal career.

ABRAHAM: What a sad bunch of wannabe scientists with dreams abandoned.

RENNIX: What happens to a dream deferred, does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or does it transmute into a JD overnight?

CATE ROOT (ADMINISTRATIVE MAVEN): When I was little I would’ve said I wanted to be Barbie or a princess. I wanted a title without responsibilities.

ABRAHAM: The wisest of the CA children.

BEE: #wife

ROOT: Being a wife without a husband is clutch.

BEE: Top job.

ELI MASSEY (BUSINESS MANAGER): When I was younger I thought maybe I’d be a rabbi or a lawyer, but then from fifth grade all the way up until college—when I studied at a conservatory—I thought I’d be a musician.

NATHAN J. ROBINSON (EDITOR-IN-CHIEF):  I wanted so badly to be an architect. In 2nd grade I collected all these books of house blueprints and started drawing my own blueprints. I have a giant binder full of them. They’re absurd, I was an absolute obsessive. I put sizes for all the rooms but I had trouble calculating the overall square footage so all the plans have little notes from my mom where she added the square footage. Looking back, what’s remarkable is how boring they were. I wasn’t designing castles, I was designing very staid Florida single-family houses. I can’t think why this so fascinated me. Anyway, after that I wanted to be a film director and wrote a bunch of scripts before finally resigning myself to being a lawyer. 

GOLD: That’s right folks: Nathan was a baby Howard Roark. Thanks for joining us!

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