George Shornack:  

one else is. The rest of it was kind of a drag, except for the girls in HomeEc that used to hook me up with snacks on the way to class, and the teachers that never turned me in for smoking outside the parking lot doors. lol I guess it wasn't all a drag, I just used to get hassled for being an Individual, and that's never fun. As I've said, the journey to self is a treacherous one. Truth be told, except for studying harder, I wouldn't have changed it. I did meet the first girl I ever fell in love with, and I did make some good friends. Two things I find very important in Life. College Well, I didn't go to a traditional college, though I sometimes wish I had studied harder and got into Harvard or Yale. Seriously. At any rate, I went to school for music recording in NYC down in the village. It was, in a word, awesome. School was great and all, but getting out of class and walking 2 blocks to Wahington Square Park in the Summer, or hopping on the subway and going to Brooklyn for lunch was like nothing I had ever experienced. I used to go to the city a lot before that, but it's a whole other mindset when you're in the mix everyday. There's an energy to the city that can't be explained, it has to be felt by being there. It was there that I was able to immerse myself in whatever culture I was interested in, if even for a day. I didn't particularly care for getting up at 5:30 every morning to catch the bus. I was never a morning person, as some of you that were in my grammer school & H.S. morning classes know. But, this was different, I knew whatever it was, I would see, hear, or feel something interesting every day. Well, that and, I was paying for it this time. lol This was supposed to be about school, right? Oh yeah.....well, it was hard sometimes, but worth it in the long run. One of the many cool things were the classrooms themselves. Some were set-up like recording booths, some were sound labs, and about a half dozen were actual recording studios, where we would "enginneer", meaning, we would listen and watch a guy who knew what he was doing. After a while we got to use the machines, and that's where the magic happened. "Hey, Mr.X, I dropped my stylus in the machine", "Mr.X, I forgot to mark the tape reel", "Mr.X, I spliced the tape and now it won't play". "Mr.X, I need more time on the board for the test." Hmm...I guess that magic's funnier if you were there. **skips a lot of details and moves on** From here I had dreamed of getting an enginneer job at Electric Ladyland Studios in NYC. For those of you who aren't familiar, that's Jimi Hendrix's original recording studio. At the time he had it built, it was state-of-the-art. Apparently, I was just one in a billion students who had the same idea. Come to realize, just knowing you rock doesn't get you in many doors. :P Flash to current day....as stated briefly in the Life Bio, I'm in the process of opening a music studio in the surrounding area. I won't go into details here either, I'll wait until I open. All I'll say is, it's going to be something nobody in the area has done. You're welcome to come and check it out when it's open. Workplace My work experience has taken me from dirty warehouses to sitting pretty at Fortune 500 companies. After all that, I've come to realize it's all the same...working to make someone else rich. Now, if you're in a medical field, a teacher, or some other where your job is for the greater good, that's a different story. But, if you're just sitting in an office (and I've had a few nice ones) working long hours, and all you get at the end of it is a gold watch, it's time to do something else. That's just my opinion. The only thing I really enjoyed about working in a corporate or office environment, were some of the intellectually open-minded people I met. I do enjoy exercising my brain, and being exposed to different elements of Life. I've been fortunate to have worked in companies alongside, scientists, lawyers, stock brokers and the like, who have showed me things I might not have been exposed to otherwise. To that end, I feel I can hold a conversation on just about anything with anyone. That's not to say I have expertise on anything, just that exposure to many different lifestyles has expanded my personal interests. Alas, the career journey has brought me to a place where I'm doing it for myself. I figure, if I have to work 40-60 hours a week, I want to see the fruits of my labor. I may not get to keep all of it, but I get to keep most of it, and that's more than I had working for someone else.