After Peanuts had mined the rich vein of childhood angst, its main plots shifted to the more whimsical and fantastic. At the centerpiece of this was Snoopy, a Beagle who ceased to be a dog, and instead became another one of the kids, only with a wide imagination that opened every conceivable type of career to him.
We would see Snoopy, fully bipedal and wearing a hat and bowtie, intently walking to work, saying in thought bubbles "Here's the World Famous Attorney"...or other career of the week. And the joke for the audience, as the years went by, and Snoopy became an automatic part of our worlds, is we had quite forgotten what Snoopy started as, and whether he was a dog, a child, or a World War I Flying Ace.
When I step off the Metro in one of the biggest financial centers in the continent, and head to work, clutching a bag full of photocopied books and hoping that the clothing that I've purchased hang together well on me, rushing past crowds of people in muted colors, I sometimes narrate this to myself: "Here comes the world famous English teacher, ready to bring language fluency to important executives at the biggest corporations in the country". When I say in my simple Spanish to the concierge "Yo soy professor de Ingles por...", I can imagine myself looking like a beagle with a briefcase. And then I am drinking free tea and eating free cookies, looking out through plate glass windows on the 18th story at the snow capped Andes, and I feel like I am, indeed, living a fantasy. And much like Snoopy, my time not spent in adventuring is spent sleeping or waiting for suppertime.
And just like how Snoopy is dog, boy and fighter pilot, and we forgot which version is the real version, I am both living like a college student, worried about money, unable to communicate with those around me, and ready to crawl back to my dog house at the end of the day; but I am also living a life of high adventure and romance, working in the center of society in a way I never have, and at least on the outside, living the dream.