After some serious consideration late last night, I decided that when I grow up I want to be a dinosaur.

Some would say that since I have a job, live in my own place and independently support myself that I have already "grown up." Others would scoff and say you can't just become a dinosaur. A few people would probably laugh, roll their eyes and think I am joking. And at least one person in Pittsburgh would know exactly what I'm talking about, slap me a high-five and make a dinosaur roar in agreement.

To the naysayers, I dismissively blow air through my lips in a "pfft" sound and to my compatriot in Pennsylvania I say RAOOORRRRWLLLR.

(As I'm about to begin life as a non-English speaking beast, I decided I should limit responses to the nonverbal realm as often as possible. Practice makes perfect, you know.)

Giving up my humanity to become an extinct creature isn't a choice I've made lightly, mind you. No, this process began a long time ago, when I was four or five.

Like all small children, I was powerless to stop or even influence the forces of the world raging around me.

Adults dressed me, adults forced me to eat my vegetables and adults told me what was "important" to know in this world. Adults told me that they knew best even while the news told me about how adults were mucking everything up at the same time.

Of course, adults get tired of bossing kids around from time to time, so they occupy them with mindless distractions and toys to play with while they go about their grown-up business. It was in these supposedly harmless toys where adults first showed me the path to salvation. They showed me the dinosaurs.

Between the books with giant color photos, movies with stop-motion monsters, and my own toys - which obeyed my every terrible and malicious command - dinosaurs never listened to adults. In the few lousy, B-quality movies that even proposed a world in which dinosaurs existed side by side with humans, the dinos were always the superior species. If they wanted to hang out all day and eat ferns, they could do it. If they wanted to gore, trample and eat their way across the swamplands, they would do that too. And nobody told them when it was nap time.

So now the only decision left to make is which dinosaur I want to be. I could be the noble triceratops, gently eating vegetation along the riverbanks and fending off predators with my three mighty horns. I could become the giant brontosaurus and leave behind my earthbound woes simply by stretching my long neck into the sky.

Or I could simply stay in the sky as a pterodactyl, soaring through the air and finally experiencing what all birds enjoy when they make a mess on unsuspecting targets below.

Who am I kidding? If I'm going to be a dinosaur, I might as well be the biggest, baddest brute of all: the tyrannosaurus rex. I want to stomp around, chomping on anything that gets in my way. I want to have tiny arms that flail about and a giant gaping maw, filled to the brim with razor sharp teeth and bits of bone from my latest victim. I want to be the meanest mamma jamma in the jungle.

But most of all, I can't wait to go through my mid-life crisis as a towering T-Rex. Instead of buying a ridiculous sports car, I'll just eat two or three.

(Insert yummy noises here.)