I have an unusual occupation — I write fantasy for a living. This means I’m succeeding in a field where lots of people try and fail, a field lots of people dream about working in. I often talk to people who are impressed, who say they’d never have the nerve or persistence or creativity or whatever to be a full-time writer.
Every so often I run into someone from my past who chose an even stranger field, one that strikes me as something I would never have dared to attempt, and that I never would have expected of the person in question. There was a friend from high school who became a fine artist — he mostly shows at a gallery in Georgetown. Another friend from high school now does special effects in Hollywood. There was a guy named Norman who dropped out of Princeton to become a Formula One racer (and was pretty successful, last I heard).
And I’ve just discovered that a woman who roomed across the hall from me at Princeton is now a professional psychic. She loves it — she gets paid to talk on the phone.
This is someone with a degree from Princeton — I think in either math or engineering, though I’m not certain. And she’s a psychic.
These are very strange days indeed.