Yoo 590 - Dream Life, Life

I went on a run this morning and it was pretty painful, to say the least. My left hip flexor was being all vocal about having to function and the ball of my right foot was especially complainy on the rocks and to top it all off my stomach became disgruntled. I'm sure that had nothing to do with the pop tarts and liter of Mountain Dew I consumed on my drive out to Government Canyon but in the name of being an adult I'll take responsibility for it. 

Being an adult is lame!

So I was in pain but I still had 3 hours of running ahead of me and I successfully forced my mind into thoughts about my dream life, spurred by a Colbie Caillat song.

It took it pretty far. 

In my dream life I was a child prodigy triathlete. I qualified for the 2004 Olympics in Athens and took the silver. Fueled by a quest for gold, I returned in 2008 to Beijing and won. Even in my dream life, I still couldn't palate Wheaties without sugar so my face was actually on boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And Papa Johns boxes, but only when you bought the Hawaiian BBQ Chicken pizza. 

I turned down an offer to Dance With The Stars after and instead earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Chemistry, cause chemistry is cool. 

I was working on my PhD in New Zealand when NASA called and extended me an interview to join their astronaut training program. It was a pretty awesome interview and I was hired. 

(NASA wasn't dealing with funding cuts in my dream life. their budget was more like the debt ceiling...limitless.)

Then came a couple years of training (including flying a fighter jet!) and one thing led to another and suddenly I was the first woman on the moon. 

What up Neil Armstrong!

I stayed there doing research for 6 months and also ran the first lunar marathon and ultra-marathon. Heck, I actually ran around the whole moon with minimal support.

What up Dean Karnazes! First south pole marathon? I traversed the dark side of the moon!

When I got back I met Greg and we got married and adopted Roscoe and not much was different. 

Except I was still working for NASA and they wanted to research pregnancy and birth in space so I signed up for the mission. 

Do you think pregnancy would be easier in space? I have no idea but I imagine weightlessness could alleviate some symptoms and aggravate others.

But anyways, after having the first space baby I retired and started traveling the world. 

There were more kids and we road-schooled and saw all the things. Eventually space pregnancies became common and some commercial company hired me to be their space doula. I could stay on the ground and assist from anywhere in the world, or travel to space and spend a few nights with Earth floating outside my window. It was perfect. 

 ^^ magical dog ^^

Oh, also, Roscoe was magical and could morph into any animal I needed. Like a horse when I wanted to go riding or a tiger when I needed protection or a unicorn when I really wanted to mess with people's minds. 

Or a small dog when we needed to travel via plane. 

It was basically the best life ever. 

Eventually my mind was spent and the real life suffer fest could no longer be ignored. I still had an hour left when some big guy dressed in fatigues carrying a massive pack came breezing past me. We were at least 4 miles from any trail head so he took all the fun out of feeling sorry for myself and the run sucked even more.

Thousands of crappy seconds later, I arrived back at my car. But not before deciding that my less far-fetched dream job would be running to fuel innovation. Basically I'd just go on a couple long runs a week where I'd let my brain go wild and record all my thoughts and then some company like Google would pay me tons of money for the raw, crazy ideas. 

It'd be their engineers' job to make something of it but I'd probably be willing to consult a little during the process.

Wouldn't that be awesome?

Have a great day :-)