The same thing I’m doing from now until the start of the winter academic quarter: watching porn and surfing the SDMB all day. The difference is, it would ideally be because I don’t need a job to support myself, while right now it’s because I’m too lazy to look for one and I’m staying with the 'rents.
Seriously, though, I would love to be a political leader, but I have too many skeletons in my closet.
I liked filmmaking, but I’m terrible at it. My taste in movies is far better than my actual skill in creating them–whether from behind the camera, in front of it, writing the script or editing. I’m not bad at editing, actually, but I find it boring. I can spot a truly great edit and just know that I don’t have the passion for that job that would lead me to come up with it.
I would love to teach history to high schoolers, too, but it’s just such a pain in the ass to take on a minor in Education Studies. Sigh. And I just don’t know enough history. I would probably make a great English teacher, but English classes just don’t challenge me. Luckily, a Linguistics degree is probably a decent inroad to an MA in English.
Really, I would love to teach an age-appropriate, scaled-down, easier version of Linguistics 101 to high school seniors. The feeling of defeating ignorance on a daily basis would just be awesome. I’ve tutored at my old high school and loved it. It almost never felt like work, despite the fact that I felt drained at the end of the day.
I would also like to be a writer, but my first round of rejection letters was disheartening and I just don’t feel I have the patience to get really good at it. And I know that true success comes with novel-writing, while my attention span just isn’t that long.
I could go for Padres bench coach, too.
On that note, I’d like to be a beer patron: be filthy stinkin’ rich, run a brewery, hire a couple of hardcore homebrew aficionados and let them play with a professional rig. Every time they said, “I wonder what <xyz> would taste like”, and I said “Well, why don’t you crank out a barrel or two and find out?”, I know they’d get that gleam in their eye that would just make my day. Plus, we’d hit on enough good ideas to pull in some decent cash flow, theoretically. Craft brewing in San Diego seems to be an easy field to grow in, especially since the big guys (Stone etc.) are not at all competitive and are willing to help the new guys get a leg up.