Meandering Mind

Leave it to a puente* to get my sleep schedule all out of whack. Usually I'm dying to be off in dream land by this time at night, but I had 4 days to get into bad sleeping habits (a.k.a. up until 4 or 5 am and sleeping until 2 or 3pm).  As I'm laying here awake, I started to think a little bit...as one usually does when there's nothing else to do and I can't allow myself to do anymore useless Facebook stalking and I've already watched too many episodes of Downton this weekend (I'm thinking to myself in a British accent if that tells you anything)...

I was thinking about dreams.  Seems odd to think about dreams when I can't fall asleep, but anywho, for some reason I recalled a question I had to answer in my interview for the Americorps job last March about what my dream job and aspirations were.  I was so stumped by this question and I still am pretty sure that my answer was the reason why I didn't get the job.  I said that I didn't have a dream job.  I remember that as the words came out of my mouth, the interviewer immediately wrote notes down on her paper, and I knew that what I had said wasn't the answer they were necessarily looking for.  But tonight I'm thinking about this again for whatever reason, and I'm wondering to myself why this is such a big deal?  It's not just a question you get randomly in 1 out of 100 job interviews.  It's a pretty important thing to people, and it seems like something we need to know about others in order to get a really good sense of who they are. 
Of course I have dreams and aspirations about my life (which I did try to explain in the rest of my answer, fyi) but I don't understand why there has to be such a focus on them.  I guess what I mean to say is that sometimes I feel like there is too much pressure to be a success and to have a dream and to do anything and everything in your power in order to achieve that dream.  Don't get me wrong because I believe that this can also be a great thing.  But what if you're like me and you have an idea of where you want your life to go...but you accept the fact that life is crazy and sometimes it finds us before we find it?  Doesn't this seem much more logical of an answer than "Well my dream is to spend 2 years in a Master's program studying this amazing topic that I have been passionate about my whole life, and then after that to land my 'dream job' doing this very specific thing that I have already been living in my mind for my whole adult life".  That sounds robotic and droll to me.  But for me to say "I have no dream job" sounds lazy.

In the end, I know that I have never dreamed about a job (Work? Gross).  I've dreamed about seeing things and learning more and growing up and meeting wonderful people and making a difference.  I never imagined myself doing any of these things in a specific career, just in any way that life allows me to.  That is what would make me happy, and isn't that what our dream job is supposed to be afterall?









*puente - Spanish word basically meaning a long weekend due to a holiday