When I Grow Up......

Duke

Open-minded critical thinker
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As a youngster, what did you want to be when you grew up? How often did this change as you got older? How close did you come to becoming what you wanted to be?
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My first choice (no laughing)...was a Mounty. Since I was not Canadian this was not going to happen :p
My second choice was a lawyer. I grew up to get a paralegal degree. So I sort of stuck with that theme. Books and horses, I probably wasn’t much fun.
 
I wanted to be a stuntman! Jumping off buildings, crashing cars, explosions; what job could possibly be more fun and exciting than that? Having grown up in Southern California I actually knew people who were professional stuntmen. One guy I knew also did pyrotechnics and effects makeup. He had no problems taking me in as an assistant/apprentice in order to help jumpstart such a career.

I also had the opportunity to intern at an actual Hollywood TV studio, though granted it wasn't a very big or well known studio. In fact it was a brand new studio still trying to make a name for itself. While it did have a few successful TV shows nobody really expected Fox Broadcasting to ever amount to much.

However there is one big drawback to this kind of career, you have to live where the work is and that's in and around Los Angeles and Hollywood. Having grown up in that area I can confidently say that you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I left California at 18 and don't ever want to live there again.
 
I hear you, Steve! I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and love it, but I hate LA. I've optioned a few screenplays that required meetings in LA and negotiations with LA show peeps. All promises and big talk and lies. blech!

I always wanted to be writer, but I was always told that you can't make a living that way, and you have to have a real career. My parents also SAID I could be anything I wanted, but always followed it up with "But you should be a nurse." (My mother was a nurse, and a very good one, and loved it.) I did NOT want to become a nurse, so... I went to school to become a counselor, dropped out, got my massage therapy license, hated doing that, got married, got divorced, went back to school, got a degree in what was interesting (anthropology), discovered there are no jobs for undergrads in Anthro, started working for a bookstore, and ended up managing bookstores until Amazon ate the bookstore business. Now, I'm a writer, but Mom was right- you can't make a living that way, which is why I'm a stay-at-home house-wife to a computer engineer who makes a good salary! :D *eyeroll* In other words, I'm a writer... Which is what I always wanted to be!
 
Greetings from the wretched hive of scum and villainy. :)

In the late 80s/early 90s I spent 2-3 weeks out of every month in SCal, primarily Burbank, Long Beach, and Pico Rivera. Long Beach I really liked, but viewed LA as a whole as OK to visit, but not a place I would live. I think I watched too many episodes of Dragnet and Adam-12 growing up.