The Road Not Taken

I majored in English.  When most people hear this, their immediate response is "oh, so you're an English teacher then, right?"  No.  I am not an English teacher, I have never been an English teacher and I am fairly certain that I will never be an English teacher.  There was, however, a period of about three days in eighth grade where I thought that being a teacher sounded kind of fun.  But then I stopped, looked around the classroom full of angsty preteens and decided that perhaps there was a better career out there for me where I wouldn't have to confiscate pogs and tell kids that snorting Pixie Sticks isn't good for their nasal cavities.  Yet, I get this question almost daily and lately, I've started to wonder what I'd be like had I followed my eighth grade whim and become an English teacher.  I'd probably wear lots of tweed and would suddenly become obsessed with elbow patches.  I'd use a beat up yardstick to point to my slanted, cryptic writing on the blackboard and would be slightly offended every time a student mistook a lowercase "r" for a "v".  I'd make my kids refer to their literature by saying the author's last name before they said the title of each book.  Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.  Paton's Cry the Beloved Country.  Shakespeare's Othello.  I'd speak of the literary canon in near religious terms.  I'd own too many pencil sharpeners and would buy eight dollar pens every time I went to Office Depot.  I would start adopting pets and would give them literary names: a cat named Dickins, a dog named Boo Radley and a hamster named Hamlet.  Everything would be an archetype or a symbol for something else.  I would read too much into everything.  I'd eat a turkey sandwich on wheat with an apple for lunch everyday and would have a not-so-secret crush on the slightly nerdy music teacher.  After 5 years of me turning red and saying things like "grood day" every time I saw him, we'd finally start dating.  Some of our students would see us furniture shopping together and rumors would start to circulate.  Eventually it would come out that he'd been married all along to someone I used to know growing up and I'd go back to my life of turkey sandwiches, tweed and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.  So no.  I am not an English teacher.