The Five-Year Plan

Where do you see yourself in five years? Do you see yourself in a house overlooking the water with a beautiful family of five? Do you see yourself managing a small business that is finally starting to flourish? Or do you see yourself traveling the world, a modern day nomad, living out of a knapsack and hitching rides from strangers?
Wherever you see yourself in five years, it is unlikely that the scenario you envision right now will match up perfectly with the one you will actually live. However, it is always good to set goals, always good to have something to strive for, to shape and mold your life in such a way that it turns out more or less how you want it.
For today’s blog, I am going to outline my possible five-year plans. As many of you know, I have very little idea what I will be doing in the future. However, I am more than confident it could be any one of the following things. As Lance Armstrong so prophetically states in his book, “It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life”: Carpe diem. Seize the day. Or, as we like to say here at Blog is the New Blog, Carpe quinquennium, “seize the five years.”

Five-Year Plan #1
After deciding I need to see Asia, I take a job teaching English in the Xinjian province of Western China. There I meet Liu, a young girl who claims to know a man that can levitate simply by mediating for several hours on end while sitting on a plate of steamed broccoli. I study with the levitation master for four years, but by the end only succeed in levitating my right arm, though it is unclear whether or not this is because I am using my shoulder muscles. After four years I return to the village where I once taught, to find that everyone is completely fluent in English, and Liu, the girl who told me of the levitation master, has stolen my job. I spend the next year mourning and ingesting large quantities of steamed broccoli.

Five-Year Plan #2
I decide to become a computer programmer, and move to Mountain View, California, where I camp outside the Google headquarters for three years, furiously digesting books of HTML code until one day the Google people take pity and decide to give me a consolatory interview. The interview ends abruptly after a live rodent pokes its head out of my beard, which hasn’t been shaved since I moved to Mountain View three years prior. I am rushed out of the room by two very large men and transported to Shady Acres, a nearby hospital for the criminally insane. After two years I am deemed sufficiently in possession of my faculties to be allowed out, whereupon I move back to Seattle and become a low-level blogger.

Five-Year Plan #3
I become a model for Victor’s secret, the male alternative to Victoria’s Secret. I move to Brazil and party with model folk for five straight years before finally burning out, locking myself in my room, and refusing to communicate in any other form but the djembe, a medium-sized African drum.

Five-Year Plan #4
Money doesn’t buy happiness, but gold bullion does. I become starkly aware of this fact in Five-Year Plan #4, in which I move to the Yukon to become a gold-prospector in hopes of striking it rich. After panning for gold for two years in glacially cold water, I find a nugget the size of a softball and sell it on Ebay for 2.4 million dollars. With the money I start my very own moose farm called “Moose, Wetzler, Moose” on whose grounds are bred some of the finest riding moose north of the 48th parallel. One day, while trying to break a particularly stubborn two-year-old, I am thrown, hitting my head on the ground and suffering a rare form of amnesia that does not allow me to remember any childhood experience that involved ice cream. While not a particularly dreadful ailment, I am brought to tears two years later when my first-born child asks me what my favorite flavor of ice cream was when I was a kid, and I burst out, “I don’t know! And I’ll never know!”

Five-Year Plan #5
I start a company called, “Take Charge of Your Life,” whose main objective it is to devise livable five-year plans for wayward teens and twenty-somethings. The company founders after parents of the teens and twenty-somethings discovers that the majority of their children have either moved to the Yukon to attempt gold-prospecting, or have turned to a life of methamphetamines and living on the street. After refusing to take responsibility for the company’s failure, I am indicted on charges of racketeering and transferred to minimum-security federal prison, where I serve out the length of my sentence knitting stocking caps for underprivileged kids in Spanish Harlem.