Austin Improv

ChrisTrew.Com wrote:I always wanted to be an actor.

Well, close enough.

i wanted to be a grad student.

no joke.

this is what it looks like to live the dream.

miggy!! we apparently have always been on the same career path.

i too wanted to be a carpenter when i was little. my grandpa had a woodshop and i would build all sorts of things. i actually took shop classes in high school...i was a nerdy straight a student in with all of the stoners. they loved me

Asked as a child what I wanted to be, I remember happily answering "A scientist!" I was fascinated by aircraft and I thought it'd be cool to be an aeronautical engineer designing jets and rockets and other speedy flying stuff. I took one of those career aptitude tests and the top suggested job was "systems analyst." Nice (and prophetic even) but the problem was the test didn't bother to explain what the hell a systems analyst was.

"Hmm, I know what 'system' means and what 'analyst' means, but the phrase 'systems analyst' means much less than the two words before they were combined. Fat lot of good this test is."

So I went to college and they asked me what I wanted to major in; I thought 'undecided' was weak, I liked computers, but did well in chemistry so I majored in that because (and I quote:)

"I don't want to spend my life tied to a terminal."

BWAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

My GPA dropped, my alcohol tolerance rose, and I decided that chemistry was a dead end and chemical engineering was too hard, so I snuck into the nuclear engineering program and somehow ended up with a Master's degree. Four years of working at a powerplant convinced me that everyone would be a lot happier if I didn't do that anymore. I moved to Austin and worked for a crazy (i.e. mentally ill) game designer, spent another 5 working at the #2 search engine company until it decided to be the #0 bankrupt company. Somewhere in there I decided that I liked being a sysadmin working with smart people more than being a web programmer for idiots. So here I am.

Now I want to teach and do research and program and build things and inspire people and I want to do it all well enough that people give me enough money to live on and overlook the fact that I didn't get up until 11am and only wear a tie when I feel like it.

Oh, and I finally figured out that 'systems analyst' was the 1975 term for sysadmin so I guess sometimes those tests aren't completely worthless.

Astronaut...
Astronaut...
Astronaut...
Science Fiction writer...
Filmmaker...

Figure that one out

garbage collector.
shop keeper.
astronaut.
annie (or plucky orphan).
musical theatre actress.
lawyer.
welder.
baker.

a scientist.

which i am. but i think as a young un, i was more imagining research in the deep forest. hmm.

DollarBill wrote:

Roy Janik wrote:astronaut or a writer or a paleontologist.

DUDE. Astronaut and paleontologist.

That is freaky. Me too, totally. I just put my old-ass NASA paraphernalia and shoebox full of fossils into storage recently. I'm not sure if it was because I was really, really into dinosaurs when I was a kid, or if I just liked surprising grownups by saying "paleontologist".

I went through several stages, but all of them involved being some kind of scientist. Until I got my hands on an old Apple ][ computer when I was 12, then I really wanted to make games. Still working on that one, there. Science still rocks, though.

UPS driver or a con woman

Animator/Artist... Done.

I pretty much wanted to do everything that I saw other people do (creative-wise).

I remember one year when my family went to Disney World and when we got home I started designing an animatronics exhibit for the backyard that I was going to wheel people through on a red wagon. Forget the fact that I did not know anything about animatronics or own a red wagon. All I knew was I was going to get some chicken wire to make frames which I was going to coat in latex.

Also I wanted to be a playwright. I started my first work, a war piece, when I was nine years old. I wrote the first act on a pink note pad no bigger than a post-it pad. Then I got bored and played barbie's till dinner.

I swear this is going to sound like a joke, but when people used to ask me when I was a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, there was only one thing I could think of, because I'd heard my parents say it so many times...

Independently Wealthy.

Up until about ninth grade, I had always wanted to be an engineer or computer programmer of some sort.

Then I tried out my freshman year for the high school One-Act Play.

A mistake which haunts me (and my income) to this very day...

I grew up wanting to be a cartoonist, drawing garfield over and over again to get it right. In high school & college, I had a comic strip "Cheesepuffs" which featured googlyeyed lizard teens. My mother still feels strongly that I should get back into this. I don't know what happened to make me so cynical that made me stop dreaming this childhood dream, but something did happen.

My dream-nut has not fallen too far from the tree, though. I like who I am, I like what I do, I want to do more of it... I just wish the money would follow. I have faith that it will.