“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Rants & Raves is an opportunity for writers to express opinions, wax poetic and share thoughts about entertainment, politics, life, or whatever else they feel like talking about. These are strictly writer opinions and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of INFLUX Magazine, but rather provide an outlet to express one’s ideas.
by Bethany Rose
There’s No Way That’s a Job (That Pays the Bills) I’ve always had an active imagination, so when I was a child asked the cliched “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question, I often had a unique answer. Two responses I recall were magician and Daphne from Scooby-Doo. Unless I am secretly Grey DeLisle or Sarah Michelle Gellar, that second goal didn’t happen and wasn’t really attainable in the first place. But that is a child’s imagination, a wonderful thing that is often cute and perhaps even inspiring. You know what’s not cute and inspiring? The wacky jobs many movie characters have.
Without giving away too much personal information, I want to tell you a little about some of my close friends. I have a few friends in the medical field, most of them nurses. I have a few friends in the education field, most of them teach college courses. I have a few friends in retail, most of them store managers and sales associates. I also know a few writers. Now, when I say writers, I mean these people are very talented at writing, and they have been published in some way, but none of these people has a career as a writer. Most of them write and do one of the other jobs I listed. Nothing wrong with that (I certainly fall in that category, though feel free to debate my actual writing talent). I think all of these careers are common. Nothing wrong with that either. But I have noticed that movies love to include characters with unique professions. Some of these professions are so unique, that I often wonder if they were completely made up for the movie. Others are ones I am aware of, but have never actually met anyone in that profession. For example, in Take this Waltzwe have a cookbook author, married to a freelance writer, who is interested in an artist/rickshaw driver. In Failure to Launch we have Sarah Jessica Parker playing Paula. Her job is to date men who won’t move out of their parents’ house, build up their self-esteem, and then build up their confidence enough that they will “launch” away from home and finally start their own life.
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At the end of What’s Your Number, Ally finally knows what career she’ll have after losing her job. She will make ugly “artlike” things. I don’t really know how to describe them. Fortunately her family is loaded. I guess that’s another reason I find these jobs annoying. The characters don’t seem to worry about bills, and they don’t balance their quirky job with three other jobs. If I quit my jobs tomorrow and started pretend dating people to help out their parents, would I be a success? Would I even be able to find one client? Is it even a safe idea? I guess that when watching a film like Failure to Launch I’m not supposed to think about these things, but after seeing it happen in movie after movie, it gets pretty annoying pretty quickly.
