Yesterday's Future

I have a nicely bound "anything book" that I filled with high school crap like book covers, report cards, school IDs, and prom memorabilia. In the notebook is an assignment I did in tenth grade for my Honors English class. The teacher wrote the questions and I interviewed a family friend.


For extra credit I pretended to interview myself in 2024 (at which point I would be 56). Reading the extra credit part of the assignment was so painful that it took me four tries to get through it. When I was 15, I was planning that by the time I was 56 I would:

Have attended UC Santa Cruz and Boston University;
Be fluent in Spanish, German, and Japanese;
Have published at least four novels and at least three books of nonfiction;
Own my own restaurant, through three closures and one almost-bankruptcy;
Married;
Adopted three boys;
Still be friends with the friends I had in tenth grade;
Occasionally write columns for the San Francisco Chronicle;
Have been on Time's bestseller list at least twice; and
Be taking one course at a time in things like film making.


I wonder when I thought I would sleep. Sometimes I look back and think I must have been a really annoying person when I was teenager.