Second Acts

I wouldn’t mind being Ina Garten in my next life—a queen of simple, delicious cooking and entertaining whom Tina Fey suspects is only a figment of middle-aged women’s collective imagination. I’ve watched Ina’s cooking shows for years and just finished reading her memoir. She’s a woman who likes to be busy and challenged, like me. She was brave enough, decades ago, to quit a desk job in favor of running a specialty food store because cooking was what she loved. I recognize a tiny bit of that spark in myself when I sit at my desk daydreaming about what to cook for dinner. Often, that’s just figuring out how to use the assortment of ingredients that have collected in my fridge.

It might be fulfilling to spend days in the kitchen perfecting flavors and serving up tasty things to my husband and appreciative friends. The kitchen is a great place to listen to music, so I could indulge in the library I’ve been building on a decidedly-not-Spotify streaming service, singing and humming and getting my hands dirty instead of sitting in front of a computer. I’d be able to learn how to cook all kinds of things I’ve been curious about and haven’t really had time for.

How I would actually make a living from cooking, I don’t know. I probably don’t have much tolerance for the kind of trial and error it would take to get really good at it. I think I’m also not cut out for running my own business, like Ina does. Still, there is something alluring about going into an utterly different line of work than what I’m used to.

I’ve been in the technology field since 2008, doing the hard and underappreciated work of helping decent software get made. It’s not underappreciated because technology professionals are so great, but because users are never satisfied and the standards are, objectively, high. Modern software needs to work 24/7, doing critical things that help the world run, and it is more fragile than you’d like to think. Stressful, no? As I creep toward middle age (the Ina Garten-manifesting years) I start wondering how much longer I’ll want to do this. What might a “second act” look like?

I have a bachelors degree in natural resource management from Cal Poly Humboldt, an extraordinary place that I long for a little bit whenever they send me an alumni magazine. I’ve thought about returning there to cap off my science education with a masters degree in … something. I don’t know what, but I can be very meticulous and I think I’d work well in a lab. Even better, I could join a discipline with a combination of field and lab work so I could spend more time outdoors—forestry, hydrology, or wildlife biology. I might enjoy the combination of esoteric laboratory study and real-world observation out in the wilderness.

I’ve thought about studying chemistry as a means to get into forensic toxicology, which is the science of how substances contributed to a person’s demise. It’s the closest I could really get to any career in death investigation. I find that whole field fascinating and important, but I’m too sensitive to visit death scenes or be in the autopsy room. I could handle blood and tissue samples on a slide, though, and still get to feel like a detective.

My logical brain might be a nice fit for the paralegal profession, which does lawyer-type things without the expense of going to law school. Based on superficial research, it seems a bit mind-numbing and under-respected, but on the plus side it might be the only kind of work where it’s expected and encouraged to be pedantic. I love picking things apart and repackaging them, poking holes in arguments and editing things other people have written.

I could be a copy editor, but I live nowhere near a hub of the publishing industry.

I could run an inn, like Lorelai Gilmore, but I hate dealing with the public.

I could do any number of things, if I got financially comfortable enough to start over at the bottom, but there are so many possibilities I haven’t learned of yet.