I was supposed to be working on my book tonight, but something had been kicking around my mind lately and distracted me.
It all started a couple of weekends ago. I turned the TV on to scan the guide and see if there were any interesting movies coming up that I'd want to record and lo and behold, the intro sequence to Top Gun was playing. Yes, that Top Gun, which I'll readily admit is one of the cheesiest movies ever to grace a movie screen, but I can attest to that movie playing a central role in the decisions I've made in life. Kind of.
Ever since I can remember being able to get upset at people telling what to do, and how to do it, my Mom used to tell me that I was going to grow up to be an engineer. Mind you, Mom never told me what engineers did, or why I would want to be one, so I was never too enthusiastic about the prospects. In my mind it had something to do with the running of trains and things of that nature, which really didn't interest me at all.
What I did find captivating though, was the military. My father was Special Forces and he was always going to cool places to train, and bringing back shirts and other nifty swag that totally projected that "Snake Eater" mentality of the Special Forces. Every now and then, we'd get to go to the airfield and watch him and the members of his unit paradrop from a plane. I thought that seemed like the real deal to me, and I wanted in.
Until I saw Top Gun and became obsessed with everything there was to know about the US Navy. This led me to read the classic Red Storm Rising, and then Hunt for Red October just as the movie was made. By the time I got through devouring every source of info I could find on the subject, I was convinced that I was born to pilot an SH-60B off the tail of small boy doing port and starboard ASW ops until they pried me away from the thing, kicking and screaming.
There was just one problem with that. My vision has been atrocious since I was about 9 years. Which means I couldn't meet the bill for the military in that regard. I chased the red herring of all red herrings, and because of that, I settled into a rut where I didn't allow myself to dream about what could be.
I'm not sure when I consciously decided that I wasn't going to go to college, but it was a choice that I made on my own, that I'm certain. I know part of it had to do with the writing part (surprise). In those days, I hated writing with a passion, even though I'd always been a voracious reader, and still am one. Something about putting together a structured paper turned me off. I suppose it may have been the research element.
David Sedaris mentions something along the lines in Me Talk Pretty One Day, where he suggests the idea of telling a writer to "Create!" may be a little draconian. Now granted, there are journalists and media writers that do that type of thing at will, but for me, it's always been a constant struggle. The idea is there, or it's not, I can't just produce one or pretend to be excited because it's an assignment.
Then there was biology, which I loved, but when I finally got to take the class in Sophmore year, the teacher decided to change the curriculum. From now on the grade would consist of a weekly project, that had to be some kind of art presentation, and a final test at the end of the year graded on a curve. 50% of each score would determine your final grade.
I loved biology, still do, but jeezohcriminy I've never been able to freehand a straight line in my entire life, and never had any desire whatsoever to participate in anything resembling an art class so I thought the teacher was playing a dirty trick on us by turning a class about science into a hybrid art class. Luckily, I've always been a pretty good test taker, especially when it comes to things I like, so it was easy enough for me to squeak out a C without doing any of the projects, and blowing the test up. How's that for motivation?
So PSAT's came, I never took them. Then SAT's. Skipped those too. No one asked me why, and life went on, me with no plan, until I sat down with guidance counselor, probably the tail end of junior year.
Mary Ellen Shea was a friendly woman, that remembered who you were. She had short hair that in my estimation had greyed prematurely, and a friendly warm smile. She was also no nonense, and when I sat with her she noticed immediately that I had done absolutely no college prep work.
There were other things going on in my life at the time, and I was probably only there because it was a requirement. I skated pretty hard the last two years of school. It wasn't like I was going to college anyway? Why should I care about grades and transcripts and the like?
She asked me if I'd thought about Voc Tech, which I hadn't. She pointed out that over the next ten years 24% of the job growth was going to come in skilled trades and that the labor pool wasn't being replenished fast enough and that I should really consider that when making a career choice.
And that was that, probably the longest and most serious discussion I ever had about my future with another human being at that point in my life. Needless to say, when I sat in front of the career counselor at the MEPs station in Anchorage, choosing my job I heeded those words and remembered that disscusion. My ASVAB scores put me in a postion to choose my fate and I did, choosing Electronics Technician, because it sounded like a job with a civilian equivalent, unlike Fire Control Technician, or Gunner's Mate. Also, all the nuclear fields scared the pants out of me, even though they had the fastest rates of advancement. Probably all those Tom Clancy novels.
They say that people never forget a memory. Once something happens it becomes part of you, but if you neglect the memory enough the pathways to it become it worn and tangled and harder to reach over time even though it's still there buried in the recesses of your mind.
As I go on through time, I reflect a lot on the choices I've made, conversations I've had, friends that I've lost contact with and the people that have said things that have stuck with me. I find it especially endearing when I'm speaking to a friend of mine and they bring up a little anectodote that I've said years ago, even though I may take some coaching to remember it, because then I know that I made an impression, and that I'm part of that person, just as they are part of me.
I'd like to think that a counselor would be happy to know the same, and I wish that I could tell her that she did steer me towards the right path. There was no way that I was ready for college then, heck I may never be ready. We all have to take our path, we all have to find our own way, and people may push or pull us one way or the other, but the choices we make, in the end are our one. I would never complain about the way my life has gone. Other than a brief period of self inflicted unhappiness, it's been more than I could have asked for.
I had thought about writing this on Friday, partly because of the piece that Steve Scher did on NPR about the job growth opportunies for skilled labor, and the fact that they're still not really being promoted as a viable alternative to college. For some, working with your hands suggests that you're condeming yourself to a life of menial servitude, poverty or somesuch. Well, I'm certainly not going to waste my time debunking that, but if you ever get bored go look up the prevailing wage rates for King County trade workers, and you'll probably come away with a different opinion of your average Plumber, Electrician, Sheet Metal Installer, Heavy Equipment Operator, etc, if you didn't know before.
So I looked her up today just to see what she'd been up to, because I knew she ran sled dogs, back then, even participating in the Iditarod, and came to find that she'd died March 6th 2006, at the all too young age of 55, from cancer.
That's when I knew I had to write this, just to say thanks and to acknowledge the forward thinking woman that helped set me on my path, with I'm sure were the best of all intentions.
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Ms. Shea's Obituary on Sled Dog Central
Steve Scher's piece on Training for The Blue Collar Job
You Left Your Typewriter at my Apartment
1 week ago
6 comments:
F***. Reading this post made me sad. I ended up here after reading the cross-posted short fiction you have on Facebook. (I liked it, by the way.) I wonder if your path would have turned out much differently had we remained friends. Maybe it's a little self-centered, but I read this post with the distinct feeling that, in some alternate reality, I could have had that life.
I mean, if you look at what I do now, it's basically college-educated skilled labor. I know some technical stuff, I can work mostly independently, my customers mostly don't understand the details of my work, and I'm basically paid hourly.
From your writing, you seem like an engineer with fantastic writing skills. I've run into almost none of those since I left college.
This is all not to say you made the wrong choice. In other jobs I've had (where I was less satisfied), my mind often wandered off into fantasies of working in a "vocational" field, where the days and weeks were more independent of each other, and the workload was more predictable. It's really interesting, though, how two third-graders, both with above-average allotments of talent, could end up on these tracks laid by circumstances and juvenile preconceptions.
Uh, feel free to de-friend me if I'm starting to sound like a stalker. :) You were right about the expansion tank, by the way. The guy found a few other problems, though, and said I should think about replacing the whole boiler (which had a tag inside that said 1969), though it wasn't strictly necessary.
We joke about engineers, in a friendly manner, because without them, my job wouldn't exist, and without us the things they imagine and calculate on paper would never see reality. Ultimately, we are the ones that get stuck with having to make a design work, which means there's very little routine in my field.
I've never felt that I made the wrong choice. The point of my post is that in the end, as long as YOU make the choice than it couldn't be wrong.
It all goes back to pants, which I will I have more to say about another day. I think people are born with their likes and dislikes embedded into them. No one makes another person, it's the exposure to different things that helps a person find what it is they like. I knew what my favorite color was when I saw it, not before, and not because someone told me it was so.
People try to project their idea of happiness onto others, parents would be especially guilty of this but how could I know what makes someone else happy? I know what makes me happy, and I live accordingly.
In the end, I feel that all another person can really do for another, in that regard, is either accept that person for who they are or want to be, or disapprove of their behavior.
Speaking from an almost lifelong experience, I've found that people's preconceptions about other humans often turn out to be wrong.
This isn't a condemnation of anyone either, just my observations from living. I don't hold grudges and I've never felt that my loved ones didn't say or do things for me with the best intentions in mind, and I'm thankful for that.
There are some things in that comment that I really disagree with. While it is important to make your own choices, and while that does have a huge effect on your level of happiness and investment in those choices, I don't believe that likes and dislikes are innate.
I do think a lot of aspects of the mind are innate (I loved the book, "The Blank Slate", by Steven Pinker, where he debunks the idea of a blank slate), but I think that, in many ways, people are just reflections of those around them. I mean, that's all the brain really is. It's a sophisticated pattern-matcher with an incredibly strong drive to see itself as consistent. When I was two, someone probably asked me what my favorite color was. I was standing by some trees, and I replied, "green." And I've been justifying that decision ever since, just because of where I was standing when asked the question.
I think likes and dislikes are mainly driven by experience, and the most powerful experiences are those that stroke the ego. So if you have no preference between disciplines, and someone tells you you've done a great job at some math, suddenly, you add that math proficiency to your internal identity. Some people then follow that by pursuing the study of math, while others start avoiding math for fear of disproving the external esteem for your math skills. (There was a really interesting study on the second reaction that suggests using very careful words when praising young children for their accomplishments.)
To get back to the original discussion, I have little confidence that choices people make are choices. I don't even believe in what some people call free will. (I don't think free will can be sufficiently defined, anyway.) To me, we're just automata, reacting to the environment, each with a different innate skillset, thinking that decisions made could somehow have been made differently under the same circumstances. That delusion is just a side effect of an adaptation that manufactures regret in order to improve performance in future situations that are similar.
Because of these views, which are wildly different from yours, I come to the same conclusion: that "all another person can really do for another... is accept that person for who they are..."
I can't really respond to all of that yet.
I guess you'd have to clarify your first post for me, because reading what you just wrote, I'm even more lost as to what made you 'sad' in the original post...
Saying "I wonder if your path would have turned out much differently had we remained friends." Comes off as patronizing to me and I don't need to explain why. I think my second post covers that pretty well.
I hope the original post didn't ooze regret because again, that wasn't my aim. If it did, then I have much to learn when it comes to writing.
My small handful of regrets are centered around personal relationships, not career decisions, none of which I regret. I'm a licensed electrician in Washington State, meaning I have all kinds of choice when it comes to my job situation. Being a heating guy is just icing on the cake because everybody needs heat or hot water in the Pacific Northwest. There's not a lot of guys in our trade either so skills and experience are at a premium. Plus it's fun working for a manufacturer; Designing control circuits and systems, arguing about theory and code interpretation with my fellow techs, and having a job that gives me a lot of latitude, variety, training and travel.
I spent one fall flying from village to village in Northern Alaska starting boilers and control systems. We were greeted at the one man airport by a local with a snowmobile and we'd pile on the back, hook up our tools in tow, scream to the jobsite with our hands over our ears to keep them from freezing off. We followed the Red Sox' miraculous comeback through internet and phone calls with loved ones, and I'll never forget things like that.
Like being in the Navy, I get to see a lot of stuff that regular folk don't and that's inspired me to write. Plus I get a lot of time alone with my thoughts because we work independently a lot.
Unlike the story I wrote, I remember my past fondly, and I am a nostalgic person, my wife might say overmuch. I don't dwell on bad events, and there isn't a bone of bitterness in my body about anything... well maybe the continued suckiness of the Mariners, but baseball doesn't count as real life. It just makes those summers so much sweeter when they're good, and nothing beats fall baseball when you're watching the hometown 9 compete. :)
I hope you weren't confusing the fiction for reality. I'm not sad about anything so I wonder why you would be...
Whoaaah. I'm really sorry that came off as patronizing. What made me sad is that I read your original post, imagining you floundering around for a while, trying a few different things, not necessarily because those were the things you were passionate about. It just sounded like (waaay back in high school) it could have been really interesting to share perspectives.
I'm really not trying to put any better / worse spin on our life stories. I'm just saying that we could have learned from each other. I feel like I got tracked into engineering really early on, and while that turned out to be a good thing, I think I had blinders on to other things. Maybe I projected a little bit, but it didn't seem like you knew what was best for you back then, either.
As it is, I'm amazed at how people in college somehow saw doctor/lawyer/banker/consultant as The Four Choices. Aren't there always The X Choices until someone else shows up and expands your world a little?
Eh, no worries, I didn't get it at first, but I understand now.
See, I was hung up on:
"I have little confidence that choices people make are choices. I don't even believe in what some people call free will."
Which is why the other thing needed to be clarified for me, because it seemed like the two would contradict each other.
I don't disagree, on likes and dislikes being driven by experience either that was kind of my point with the color example.
I will concede that environment plays a factor in every choice, but I would simplify environment to "luck", as a catchall for the external factors you can't control.
I think luck is about half of the choice, and the other half would be the effort, and planning put into it, generically speaking of course.
I wholeheartedly agree with your last point.
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