Like any writer of my stature, I drew another middle school writing prompt for this week’s blog. This time it was, “What job do you want when you’re an adult?”
Well let’s be fair: I’m doing one of them, at least for 10-year-old Lisa. Writing is what I told myself I’d do from a very early age and yet somehow also avoided for most of my life. So I’m already living the epilogue of my own YA book, at least.
With that said, 39-year-old Lisa does still have a dream or two in her back pocket.
Obviously the first is that I would like to be a recipe tester for America’s Test Kitchens.
Everything I’ve seen from watching a decade of ATK appears to align with my general aesthetic. I would very much like to craft a foolproof cranberry nut muffin, for example. So too would I like to don a crisp apron and a stand-collar tunic and tell Bridget Lancaster, in a warm but businesslike manner, why the water must cook out of the pan before we add the onions.
I would like to use words like fond and Maillard reaction. I would like to see Dan’s hair in person. I would like to show Jack Bishop that I can identify the mildest Roquefort in a five-cheese lineup.
What I would not like to do, however, is measure. And remeasure. And take meticulous notes on what is probably up to 500 remeasures in a single recipe, all while one of my coworkers is having the time of her life—in my full view, as I slave away on Oven Row just out of focus—with Julia, a camera crew, and a delicate short dough.
So the Test Kitchen is probably out.
That leaves us with the second dream job of middle-aged Lisa: narrating audiobooks.
Don’t narrator working conditions just sound dreamy? I like reading. I don’t like conversations. And I love to do voices.
I mean I LOVE to do voices. Much more than other people love to listen to them. Give me any regional American accent and I will take a stab at it. Give me any indication you liked the first stab and I will slash and impale until the joke bleeds out entirely.
Watch a BBC show with me and I will parrot trivial lines of dialogue. Take me to a conference and I will form rudimentary impressions of the speakers. Ask me to read a children’s book and I will turn the villain into the Voice Banking Monopoly guy.
Spend any short amount of time with me, is what I’m saying, and I will find a way to cross the line between doing voices that are funny and doing voices that make you wish you’d driven separately.
Especially since I left the classroom.
Teaching was my outlet for all of this spectacular, unmined voice talent. I made sure to read aloud to at least one class every day. Preferably something with a dozen or so characters, like The Westing Game, but in a pinch I’d deliver a set of ISTEP instructions from whatever area of Europe the kids liked best.
So of COURSE narrating audiobooks would be the perfect job for me. I’d corner the market on Richard Peck books. My seven variations of rural, early-20th-century Hoosiers would SHINE. I’d work from home. I’d use an app to record new books and another to cash exorbitant checks.
And if I did get lonely, I’d just call Conan. He would have invited me on his podcast after hearing my surprising—and magnificent—version of The Teacher’s Funeral. Naturally, we’d have begun an intimate friendship based on razor-sharp wit and mutual redheadedness to last the rest of our natural lives. And all because I became an audiobook narrator at the age of forty.
I know what you’re thinking. And you know what?
I reject it.
You’re thinking that, like America’s Test Kitchens, audiobook narration may entail more than I want to believe. You’re thinking that dream jobs, just like dream cities and dream relationships, turn out to come pre-loaded with the human condition. And that the human condition is mostly to complain.
Well Oscar, you can get right back in your trash can today. Because for this dream, I’m embracing the Alan Watts approach: “Learn to enjoy things without needing to possess them.”
I want to be an audiobook narrator when I grow up. And I’m never going to be proven otherwise. Not because I refuse to grow up (although…is that an option?), but because this dream deserves to stay a dream. I will enjoy it. But I won’t go to the trouble of possessing it.
As anyone with a nine-year-old who’s discovered in-app purchases knows, the true joy of wanting something is, in fact, in the wanting. It’s not in the getting. The getting just fires up the old hedonic treadmill, and where could I possibly go for dopamine after becoming friends with Conan??
So I say we enjoy all the dreams that don’t come true today. And enjoy that you don’t have to fix your vocal fry, because no one is listening anyway!
