I have never planned my wedding, largely because I have never gone to a wedding. My uncle never sealed the deal, even though my mom once tried to get me to call him an ask about it. Even as a child in the single digit age range I thought “This is absolutely none of my business.” My business was regulated to cutting triangles out of my clothing and secretly hoping I got caught. My mom’s friends’ kids all live in Oregon and by the time they started marrying their high school sweethearts, I was too busy being sad in high school to go. The lack of consideration towards nuptial ceremonies doesn’t come from a place of superiority, but a place of not having cable television and therefore never seeing wedding shows. I have no cultural precedent, all I know is my parents had a bagpipe player perform Serbian folk songs at their wedding to celebrate the heritage mixing of two white people. As a sidenote, every room I’ve ever lived in looks permanently like I just moved in so how do I know what flowers look good together? I don’t. I don’t know.
I do know that my fantasies about the distant future largely pertain to my daughter; my imaginary mega-rich daughter who lives in the imaginary future, where she eats balls of drugs in Morocco. Admittedly, I actually do find that thinking about a future pretend child is inherently more pure of heart than a future pretend spouse (for I am a liar who lied to you through print media). Imaging your ideal mate? You mean constructing an amalgam of projected qualities onto a hollow stand in for emotional fulfillment? The love of your life is out there (probably), and is a real person (probably). Thinking about a kid on the other hand is like custom creating a character, a.k.a – the best part of any video game. I can’t know what she’ll become but I can wonder which of my friends would bite the bullet and donate his sperm or donate her sperm carefully crafted from an ovarian egg.
She would grow up with three huge dogs and subsequently grow up fearless. Imagine a three-year-old riding a wolf-dog like it’s a horse. Now imagine her letting someone sabotage her macaroni art piece. You can’t because this is a semi-feral wolf girl we’ve created in our imaginations. She’d look like a tiny warrior queen and her posture would be perfect from balancing on a dog all the time. The dogs’ inevitable deaths would give her a healthy taste of mortality and heartbreak right when puberty starts to set in.
She would study abroad on Garbage Island. In the future, the Great Pacific garbage patch will be settled by a group of hardy pioneers with trust funds and visitors will work on the island for food and housing. It will be just like WWOOFing only you live on a floating pile of garbage instead of going to Europe and you work in a makeshift factory that turns the garbage into something that isn’t garbage instead of farming. She’ll get a stick and poke tattoo while living in the developing commune and I will be absolutely horrified.
I will need to finagle my way into wealth, the kind of ridiculous wealth that transcends aspirational upper middle class sensibilities. Not “remodel your kitchen” wealth, but “someone compliments your rug and you wrap it up and give it to them like a Yemeni oil magnate” wealth. There’s a certain economic strata where the wild girls are, and I want to birth my offspring into that strata. Consider Alice Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter. She spent all her time smoking cigars and sleeping with senators and was still respected, nicknamed “The Second Washington Monument,” because she was rich and witty and always looked like she was over it in her photographs. Armored with financial security, she didn’t bother deigning to the boring parts of morality. For the record, of course I would love a quiet child who reads a lot, of course, everyone knows that those girls are the most savagely intelligent and secretly scary anyway. For the record, I would love a son as well; his name would be Cash and he’d drop out of graduate school to work on a ranch.
The question is how to become rich. As someone on the verge of becoming a useless turd with a B.A. the answer remains unclear. Perhaps I can utilize the other half of my fantasy life, the one that constructs situations where historical figures meet and sleep together. Would a novella in which Ada Lovelace and Soren Kierkegaard have a hyper intelligent affair be a massive hit among marketable demographics? My child’s future depends on it.
Charlotte Raskovich is the Humor editor for The Cavalier Daily.
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