Electric Dreams

The first thing I ever wanted to be was a doctor. I was four years old when I decided I wanted to grow up to save lives and cure the ill. Doctors were smart and assured and great. They were heroes. I wanted to be all those things.

I think I owe my parents for that one. They respected intelligence above all and they'd decided long before I was born that I would be bright. They took their roles as my pre-preschool teachers very seriously, stressing knowledge and education before I was old enough to understand what those words meant.

So they taught me numbers, letters, words, and definitions. I learned that education was paramount. In preschool, my teacher told them I was reading at a second grade level. I'm sure they were proud of that because they told me about it years later...more than once.

True story.

And read I did. I read everything I could, in fact. Eventually, I found my mom's book of baby names, and of course, the first name I looked up was my own.

Jason: Great healer.

Who was I to argue?

I don't remember exactly when that dream was crushed, but I remember how. I found out that doctors shouldered more than stethoscopes. They carried the greatest and gravest of responsibilities: the weight of other people's lives. Being a doctor meant fighting the good fight every day, only to face the eventualities of death and pain. Yes, they won some, but they also lost, and by the time I was done with first grade I'd decided that being a doctor wasn't for me.

After that, I wanted to be a magician. Magicians were safe. The idea of holding my own little secret, of being the only one who knew the how of the trick was...magical. Blackstone was my favorite and I had my mom buy me his magic set that Christmas. I was still so young that I truly believed my mom was just as amazed after seeing the same trick for the umpteenth time.

I simply grew out of that one. Like Santa Claus the idea of doing magic professionally became kids' stuff. I needed practicality.

One day, my second grade teacher, Mrs. White, who I absolutely adored, had our class write stories to post on the back wall of our room. I don't know where it came from, but an idea suddenly technicolored my mindscape. I wrote furiously, so furiously that the boy next to me asked what I was writing. I wasn't done yet, but I was so proud that I let him read what I had, the start of the story of a man and his elephant. It was a comedy.

He laughed. Sweet! He showed the teacher my work and told her she had to read it because it was so great. Who was I to argue? She eyed the paper incredulously, and after a fashion, handed it back to me. It wasn't finished, she told me.

No problem. I wrote, wrote, and then I wrote a good deal more. I was going to finish this thing, I swore it, and it would be the best story ever written by a second grader.

It probably wasn't, but I finished it, and she posted it on the wall, and I was very, very proud indeed.

I remember when my parents came for the parent-teacher conference. I showed them my story, still posted with the others, and stood their nervously as they read my words.

They didn't laugh.


Moving on: It was around that time that I saw that Sesame Street clip for the first time. I still remember it. These two kids made a cursor go right, then up, then left, then down, leaving a perfect square trail.

I was hooked. Yes, it's the silliest truth I've ever known, but I've loved computers ever since I saw those kids move that cursor around. So rudimentary, yet so right.

Don't get me wrong, I've dabbled in other fantasies. I've wanted to be a psychiatrist so I could delve into the minds of others. I've wanted to be a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a physicist. I even wanted to be a rapper once (my cousin wanted to be a rapper and he was the coolest person I'd ever known) but Will Smith beat me to it. And when I was a teenager, I wanted to grow up to be a sex machine, which proves that some dreams really do come true.

I've come back to writing a few times, but mostly in bouts of creativity followed by the ache of writer's block. Prose is my forbidden lover, my escape from my boring marriage to computers. I wish I could quit it! But computers win me back every time. Computers control everything, after all. The hand that types the C++ is the hand that rules the world. And the idea of being a starving artist scares the crap outta me.

So now I'm paying good money and mounting huge debts for the promise of a nine-to-five that lets me cure ill computers and write creative programs in that mystical way most will never understand. I've just started my third semester into my bachelors degree, you see, and boy is my brain numb.

Heck, if you ask me, those FAU professors should be the ones paying me.

Speaking of which...

Next up: Math Professors Are %$&^*!$ Sadists!