When I was five, I wanted to be a fire fighter (or a
soldier; I know I wanted to fight something…) Then as I progressed through
school, I decided I wanted to be an oceanographer (this is WAY BACK when Jacques
Cousteau was cool.) All of these professions had one thing in common – they had
nothing to do with my experience, they were just something I thought I’d like
to do, with no connection to my reality.
I read all about snakes and insects when I was under 12,
I caught snakes and watched ant colonies battle with each other whenever I
could, but neither one called to me as a profession. I loved math when I was in
grade school and junior high (not so much now) - enough that it carried me
through getting my Computer Science degree when I went back to school the
second time. Although I did have a passion about these things, they were all
more interesting than occupational.
I started playing brass instruments in 4th
grade – trumpet, French horn, E-flat horn, alto horn, trombone. Played around
with piano and guitar a little. Over the last thirty years, almost all of my
musical endeavors went away from instrumentals and into singing (karaoke and grocery
stores – listen for me.) For the first time in decades, I knocked the rust off
my trumpet and my lip last week, and was surprised how much I remember. This
year, I hope to teach myself the harmonica (thank you, Taylor Hicks.)
I actually thought I might become a professional musician
until the acting bug caught hold in 9th grade. That dream carried me
through a couple of years with the Tewksbury Teen Theatre Workshop, high school
and my first three years at Richland College for thirty shows or so. I think I
was pretty good, but didn’t have enough determination to continue auditioning
beyond college (you may be able to play a 60-year old when everyone in school
is your age, but when you’re out in the real world, you’re competing against
REAL 60-year olds. Come to think of it, I’m almost one of them now; I wonder…)
Throughout my life I’ve been a dilettante – a
jack-of-all-trades (and master of none. I’ve made a shirt and pants, costumes,
designed a set, directed a couple of times, decorated a goose egg, done some
non-competitive distance running, war gamed, played indoor soccer (I wish THAT
had been non-competitive), cooked, wrote music, sketched, juggled, and done
countless things well enough to say I have without doing them well enough to
get paid, Learned some French and a smattering of Russian, but don’t remember
either anymore.
I’ve been in I.T. for a quarter of a century now. I
didn’t start out trying to get there, and I did go back to school for some of
it, but strangely, I can find ways that almost everything I’ve listed above has
come into play in my current occupation, either by directly contributing to my skills,
or giving me a different way of looking at things that let me see patterns
others didn’t, and added to my personal value on the job and what I can
contribute to a team.
None of us knew when we were born what we would become.
We don’t decide at age five what we’ll be doing at age thirty (I think most of
us don’t know the answer much better when we graduate from college.) And yet,
somehow, we get there – and everything we have been informs what we are.
I’ve been writing (seriously) for at least a couple of
years now. Lots of odd things come out on my pages, and all of these things had
to have come from SOMEWHERE. Alien abductions, ghosts, mutations, murders,
extra-dimensional hitchhikers… everything in them came into my mind somehow.
You be the judge…
William Mangieri’s writing can be found many places,
including:
- His Amazon Author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B008O8CBDY
- Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/william-mangieri?store=book&keyword=william+mangieri
- Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/NoTimeToThink
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