Regrets

First off, let me just say that my biggest regret is entitling a blog post "Regrets" and then actually writing about my own personal regrets. How banal.
Second off, I must also add that another huge regret is not personal, but still a regret - Google bots, I know you're reading this and this is for you: Google+ is a big letdown, especially for this blog. I can't "share" publicly unless I also share with one of my contacts or circles. Lame.

Okay, now the stuff for that first regret...
I regret half the things I've ever done, and regret not doing half the things I didn't do. But this isn't about a specific incident or person. This is about something bigger and more existential - the loss of a dream by just stopping following it.
In my case, I wanted to be a spaceman. I don't mean an astronaut, the military pilot turned rocket-rider for NASA never much appealed to me. I wanted to be like Han Solo or Ripley or Spock - but leading a quieter, less dangerous existence. Now I know what you're thinking, "Eric, those are fictional characters, doing fictional things in a way that can only be done in a work of fiction." Yeah, I know that. But it's only fictional because we haven't done it yet.
I think I had realized by the age of six, when I began to think long and hard on how I could become the captain of my very own interstellar smuggling space craft, that I would first need an interstellar smuggling space craft. And I realized that since none of these craft seemed to be for sale, that they probably didn't exist (probably). Which implied to me at least, that I was going to need to build one or align myself with a group of individuals building one.
Even at that early age I realized I was likely going to need to be a Mechanical Engineer, an Astro-Physicist or Mathematician. Actually, I wanted to be all three. Physics and mathematics can easily be studied together and I think that most Physicists have a pretty good grasp of mathematics - not at the level of a mathematician, but at a very high level. Mechanical Engineering can be thought of (well at least by me) as applied Physics.
I was so gung ho on this - took all the math classes I could as a kid, even had my mom by me math books at the local second-hand store. I spent a lot of my free time designing space craft in many different mediums - legos, pencil and paper, clay, just to name a few. But, by high school, I was drawing diagrams, mostly of colonization ships, to which I was also figuring out crew needs and logistics for long space flights and needs for colonizing a planet. My mom and extended family, in particular my aunt, were great about encouraging this, but were also critcial of my drawings so that I first stopped showing them to the pair and then stopped doing them altogether. I don't think they even meant to be critical, but then I did. They would say things like, "I guess that's okay." or the ever popular, "Why don't you try drawing that again and then show me." Both of them were professional artists, with years of experience and years of study under their belts. I had neither. And I don't once recall them offering to help me improve my skills, other than "do it again". They pretty much made me hate drawing which I loved so much.
High school showed me other interests and subjects which I excelled in (big fish in a small pond). I discovered the Liberat Arts and really fell in love with writing - which I had already been toying with for seveal years. I read voraciously (and continued to until eye troubles). I started thinking about careers like "Attorney" or "Technical Writer" and even let my high school science teach think that I was interested in being a chemist or chemical engineer...but honest to god I hated chemistry - labs were boring and pointless to me if I could just do the calculations and arrive at the same results that other scientists already had arrived it.
In college I let it all slip away. The only thing that remained was the more than occasional joke about building a time machine or turning my car into a space craft.
Now, those are actions I regret.
Do I think that I actually would have come across a way to make an interstellar, Faster Than Light engine for a space craft? Maybe. Probably not, but I honestly believe that somebody is going to, and maybe I could have done something that would have made this possible. And maybe I would have been the one.
Now, I realize that I may be talking like I'm about to die, with all my life behind me. But, I'm only 40 and knock on wood I've got at least another 20 years. What's stopping me from doing it now? Aside from lack of funds to go back to school and general apathy? Nothing. Even the crazy woman who comes in here (I'm at the library) all the time (I believe her technical diagnosis is "Mother fucking batshit crazy") is trying to teach herself math.
I guess I'll end this by saying that I'm going to Google open source math books and programs.