swords and spies

When I was seven years old, I wanted to be an American Plains Indian. There was something appealing about living in a teepee and shooting at buffalo with arrows, tanning buffalo hides, and smoking strips of meat.

At eleven, I wanted to be an F-15 fighter pilot and be chased by Russian MiGs (fed by a Top Gun obsession). A year later, I wanted to be a CIA agent and shoot at people. I always had these weird fantasies of being the best CIA agent in the world and being married to the second best CIA agent in the world. That would probably be awkward, considering that it would be weird to know exactly what your partner did every day but not to know anything at the same time. Also, I'm not sure that we would even be allowed to work together, considering how hard it is to juggle between two personas.

Years later, I became more management-oriented and decided that I would be the director of the CIA and my husband would be the director of the FBI. Rewind a few decades to when presidents and governments actually cared about other countries (and staged coups in other countries), the president had daily morning briefings with his top advisors, including the DCI (the most powerful person in intelligence at the time) and the director of the FBI. Those meetings would be "family time", because I have no doubt that we'd both be busy putting out fires and starting new ones the rest of the time. Obviously, we'd both meet in the FBI (because we're both workaholics), he'd be my boss, and I'd eventually transfer to the CIA and the fun and games would begin.

Of course, there are sound reasons why married people should not work together in intelligence, and there is a 0% probability that the DCI and director of the FBI would ever be married to each other. Of course, the marriage would collapse and it would be hard if the FBI ever needed information from the CIA and vice versa and...

If I were to ever join the FBI or CIA or some other intelligence agency (which I won't), I would want to be in ops (stupid risk-seeking side talking). It's not glamorous and is downright drudge and danger, but better than pushing paperwork all the time (as opposed to 90% of the time). The problem is that I have too much empathy for people. I wonder if I would have the balls to really do things and not regret them later. Ah well, it's a good thought experiment.