After years of soul-searching and hard toil, I have discovered my true calling: dairy farmer.

I've wanted to be a lot of things in life-- cartoon voice, Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloon handler, pro wrestler, Madonna-- but this time, I really, really mean it.

Having been born in Euclid, which isn't really known for anything except the fact that it's named after the horrible sociopath who invented geometry, and raised in Aurora, which has few animals excepting whales and tourists, I haven't really had much of an opportunity to be around cows. Well, except maybe this big kid I went to day camp with, Pork Chop, whose mom packed his lunch in a grocery bag. But he wasn't nearly as cute as a cow, and he didn't smell nearly as good.

In fact, my only other real experience with a cow was when my parents took my friend Wendy and me on a farm tour, and this baby cow engulfed Wendy's arm up to the shoulder, leaving her coated with a foul-smelling goo for the rest of the day. After that, we kind of stayed away from the bigger animals, preferring instead to terrorize barn kittens for the rest of the tour.

But this weekend, my friend Lori brought me to her parents' dairy farm not far out of town under the pretense of looking at some puppies. I had been there once before, and had learned a lot from her brother Kevin, who informed me several times that, while I was welcome to look at the baby bunnies, I couldn't touch them, or their mother would devour them in some sort of nasty, Silence of the Lambs type fashion. This was fine by me, because the bunnies were small and hairless and sort of looked like giant gnats.

This time, it was Kevin who lured me away from the puppies; he and I had gotten bored, and were searching for barn cats to terrorize ("Don't go near that one; it had some babies once, and it ate them," he told me. This apparently occurs frequently on dairy farms) when suddenly he said, "hey, want to see a cow get unstuck?"

Well, how was I supposed to say no to that?

So we ran into the barn, where this cow, who apparently fancied itself rather svelte, had attempted to make a break for it through the human gate ("Onward to freedom!" it must have thought to itself. Or else it was just drooling and thinking about hay, either way.) Kevin, who is much smaller than me, leapt down onto the barn floor from the feeding trough; I followed, unaware that the brown coating on the floor was not, in fact, mud. Hoping it was some sort of dairy farm ritual to spread chocolate syrup on the barn floor, I gingerly made my way back up the feeding trough, where I promptly hit my head with the approximate force of walking into a moving Brink's truck. It was all worth it, though, to see Kevin, his brother, and their dad free the cow, who didn't actually seem to mind being stuck.

Other than the massive amounts of poop and the golf ball-sized knot on my head, the dairy farm was a good time. And, let's face it, it's a lot more attainable job prospect than, say, being the sixth Barenaked Lady. All I know is, if I had my own farm, I could play with puppies all the time, and occasionally free cows from human gates, which has to feel pretty good. And, if I ever got bored, I could call Wendy and Kevin, and we could terrorize barn kittens. The only drawback is, it sounds like I might have to eat my young.