A fresh decade, a new year and a semester without tears all mean that there’s only one thing for me to do: develop imaginary and outrageous predictions for my life that will no doubt get my hopes up for the future. With the peak years of Disney Channel Original Movies in the 2000s, as well as whatever Greta Gerwig released during the last decade, there’s no better source material than the last 10 years of films for my new series of delusions.
As a junior, I’m expected to have an internship this summer. At the moment, I don’t have anything planned; however, I see myself finding an internship with Anne Hathaway as she tries to juggle a healthy work-life balance. As her seemingly incapable intern, we will have conversations about life. She will feel like she can have these conversations with me because I’m not very intimidating and I’m a good babysitter for her daughter. The internship will teach me about the importance of life and set me up for senior year. Robert De Niro will be there to take my place and this is where 2015’s “The Intern” starts.
After having met Anne Hathaway at her clothing start-up in New York, I’ll come back for my final year at Michigan. A pivotal year made even more important by the fact that, before leaving New York, my superpowers will finally manifest themselves. Senior year will be about trying to understand this new characteristic of my life while also trying to juggle the social consequences of my role as Ann Arbor’s newest (first?) vigilante. Whatever troubles finance courses give me won’t compare to figuring out how to quickly change into a spandex super suit without the help of movie magic. Whether my superpowers consist of webs coming out of my wrists or an affinity for Excel spreadsheets, I will have no complaints. They really can make my life, if not better, at least more exciting, despite the fact that they supposedly come with “great responsibility.”
More realistically, or at least less based in fiction, I plan on cementing a variety of friendships that have the potential to either blossom into a fabulous whirlwind romance that I’ll remember for the rest of my life or employment after graduation. Either option is pretty fantastical at this point in my life. Like many a Disney Channel Original Movie protagonist, my odds of meeting a celebrity and having an actual conversation with them will be exponentially higher than the average person in the coming decade. The details here are hazy — will I meet them at a music camp, convince them my mom isn’t the camp chef and have them fall in love with my music? Will we become lifelong friends, have a heart-to-heart on a hill in Massachusetts only to have them marry my sibling a decade later? Or maybe we’ll sing karaoke together at a New Year’s party, coincidentally end up at the same school the following week and fall in love during the school play while trying to juggle the insane social ramifications of a jock dating a nerd. The only thing I can do now is guess, but one of these things is bound to happen to me at some point in the future.
Finally, though many of these predictions have been rooted in specific examples, there is a larger movie theme that, until now, has been missing from my life that I fully expect to experience more of in this decade: love. It can happen in 2020 or it can happen later in the decade, I’m not that picky. And it’s not really the love I crave from these situations, but the dramatic romances — where is my Nora Ephron-choreographed meet-cute? My “Little Women” friend-turned scorned lover-turned sister’s fiancé? I want the kind of intrigue that can take my 20s from just another decade in my life to my 20s. I want that kind of personality that makes my grandkids say, “Damn, I wish I knew grandma when she was hot.” I know it’s out there, otherwise we wouldn’t see so many movies about it — I just have to learn how to flirt.