In My Next Life...

I might be a photographer. Or maybe I should try to sell some of my best photos in this life. Rent a booth at a high end town fair (West Hartford comes to mind) and sell prints of Tuscany, and London, La Jolla and Boston.

Or I could be a chef. With a show on Food Network. I could hang with Guy Fieri, and finagle a way for Deanna (and Gordon) to meet Ina Garten, and for Amy to meet Nigella--or get her own show. All my nieces (well, technically some are first cousins, once removed) who like to cook (and who put a tiara on my pillow at our Thanksgiving sleepover at Dawn and Henry's)--Meredith, Amanda, Maddie, Jenna--would be over the moon. I could influence the next generation of chefs. Maybe I could even hire them.

I might go the retail route, though, because I think I'd also like to be a shop owner. If I were, only the back of my eyelids would ever see 5:30 in the morning. If not a bookstore cafe, I would own a very cool boutique (of course, I would) selling handbags and jewelry and scarves and other accessories. The packaging would be art. And then I'd also enjoy being a buyer for Crate and Barrel, and get to travel to far away places on someone else's dime, to shop for dishes and vases and fashionable imports.

But for today, and the foreseeable future, I am a teacher, who had to ask permission from the principal to go to the bank so I could take care of a debit card fraud issue (how scary that some scam artist has my account information and ran a test 0 dollar PIN transaction; how fortunate that I am vigilant about my accounts!), who caught a student cheating and later sat and watched her cry, and who is oh-so-happy the weekend is here.