It's Academic

I've been a customer of The Great Courses for many years now, off and on. It's a company that has prominent scholars give lectures on a wide variety of subjects. They started, at least with me, as cassettes, then moved to DVDS, and now, with today's technology, you can subscribe for ten dollars a month and get all that's available online and watch them on your computer.

I mostly watch courses on literature and history. I just finished one on the "Fantastic" in literature, which refers to having to do with fantasy, not the meaning of the word which means really good. I'm also watching one on the legends of King Arthur, the history of the Celts, and one on the "Barbarians of the Steppes," or those nomadic raiders that domesticated the horse.

Some of these are better than others, as some professors are cut out for being taped and some aren't. But they are all unfailingly interesting, and stimulate something else within me--my fantasy of being a college professor.

I have many fantasy lives, mostly due to my daily humdrum existence as a customer service agent for an insurance company, which is as boring and soul-crushing as it sounds. Throughout my life I have used my imagination to create a better life. This started when I was a boy, as I imagined what my future life might be as a movie star--I even made up plots for the movies I would be in. I held on to a fantasy of being a professional baseball player long after it was apparent that I had no talent in this area.

Later I fantasized about things that were more reachable, such as a novelist, or a theater or film director, playwright, or screenwriter. I'm still clinging to the author one, and am working on something so it doesn't seem completely ludicrous. I do have other ridiculous fantasies, such as being a porn star (this, to me, still seems like the best job in the world for a guy).

One of my fantasies is to be a college professor. There is a great appeal to this, as it basically means you never leave school. I liked many parts of college, and would be happy to spend the rest of my life wandering the halls of academia. However, I never really tackled this head on, believing I didn't have what it takes (I did teach sixth grade for three years, not the same thing).

One of my best friends has taught college for almost forty years, and I vicariously lived through her adventures. The first step was to get a PhD. After I got my Bachelor's I applied to the Yale Drama School, but didn't get accepted. This was a key moment in my life--why did I only apply to one school, and one of the most prestigious? I could have applied to many other schools, but instead settled into a life of menial editorial jobs (I did have a decade or so of glory as an editor at Penthouse magazine, and that was as fun as it sounds). My interest at that time was theater, and I probably could have gotten into some program somewhere and become a professor of theater, teaching undergraduates about Shakespeare, Ibsen, O'Neill, and Shepard. I think that would have been a great life. But something held me back.

Perhaps my friend's experiences warned me off. To get a PhD you have to write a dissertation, and pass an oral exam. You also have to enter a world of academic speak, narrowly focusing on one particular avenue of study. Sometimes I think I'm just not that smart, or perhaps more accurately, not that disciplined. Then, once you get hired (which is certainly not a given) you have to jump into the bureaucracy of academia. My friend has told me horror stories about department meetings from hell. The teaching is great, the administrative aspects are misery.

But spending my days reading plays, watching plays, reading analyses of plays, that sounds great. While sixth graders are almost impossible to deal with, undergraduates I think could handle. By this time they are either disciplined to pay attention in a class or they are not, and if they're not, they can leave.

I'm 59 now, so all this fantasizing isn't realistic. I can still work on my novel in progress, and maybe publish it myself. Then my fantasy goes that someone in Hollywood, maybe Brad Pitt? discovers it and wants to make it into a movie. I become executive producer. See? This is how my mind works.

Perhaps the most realistic fantasy I have now is of retirement, where I sleep in every day and just get to read and watch movies. That would be fine, too.