Hobbies versus Careers, 1983 to 2017

        There is an extreme difference between a career and a hobby. While you may love doing a hobby, you were born to do a career. If you were born with an innate gift for medicine and healing, then your career is in the medical profession. If you are innately good at leadership and law, then you were meant to have a political career. If you are innately gifted with understanding the Bible, prayer, and the Christian church, then your career is that of a theologian. If you were born with a talent for singing, then you have a career as a vocalist. The list of careers is practically endless, but what defines your career is your innate gift or set of gifts. On the other hand, if you love medicine and healing, or leadership and law, or singing, or any other activity that you were not innately gifted to perform, then those activities are hobbies, not careers, plain and simple. A career is what you were born to fulfill, while a hobby is what you enjoy doing without ever having had any innate gift for it.
        That being said, I am currently facing a dilemma that has been thirty-four years in the making, primarily because I spent thirty-four years violating the principle I just illustrated in the previous paragraph of this writing. When I graduated from High School in the Spring of 1983, it was no mystery that I was born to be an artist, being innately gifted in creative writing, dramatic theater, graphic arts, and music, with the strongest of these gifts being singing. I had inherited the gift of singing from my father, who had inherited the same gift from his father. But instead of choosing a career that reflected my innate gifts, I adamantly insisted that I belonged in the field of computers, which was still largely in its infancy back in 1983, in that there were no handheld smartphones and no public Internet yet. When I started college in 1983, I went into Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. Never mind the fact that USC also had (and still has) an outstanding School of Music, where I could have easily studied Classical and Jazz Vocals. I insisted on studying how to design computer circuits, something that would have been one of my more interesting hobbies, but something I was never gifted at doing. That first year was a disaster, and in the Spring of 1984, I was unable to maintain the scholarships that covered USC's outrageously expensive tuition fees, and was thus forced to transfer to a less expensive college. I chose the California State University in Northridge, not because I actually knew what I was doing, but because one of my High School friends started there. Still thinking that I'd be rich in the computer field, I majored in something computer-related. But because I had absolute disdain for CSUN's engineering program, I chose Computer Science, which dealt with the development of software, programming languages, and operating systems. While I was introduced to computer programming at twelve years of age, it was still a hobby, and not an innate gift. As such, I spent another eight-and-a-half years working on what should have been a four-year degree, and when I finally graduated in the Fall of 1992, I had a C+ grade-point average. And all that time in college, I kept trying to indulge in the artistic gifts I was innately born to pursue. I had it all wrong: I was pursuing a hobby as though it should have been a career, while treating what should have been my real career as though it were nothing more than a mere hobby, and I was suffering because of this.
        When I finally graduated in the Fall of 1992, I was desperate for a job. Unlike my fellow Computer Science students at CSUN, who lined up their job opportunities and employer interviews BEFORE they graduated, I was too busy struggling with one Computer Science class after another, having to retake the classes I kept failing. So when I left college, I could only find jobs that were actually beneath my Bachelor's Degree, and this went on for almost a year. By the Fall of 1993, I was hired as a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration's NISC Team. ("NISC" stood for "NAS Implementation Support Contract," and "NAS" stood for "National Airspace Systems.") I worked as a CAD Draftsman. Although the contract was supposed to last for seven years, the time-allotment was cut in half for a good number of us, and I was laid off in the Spring of 1997. While I was there, one of the innate gifts in my artistic suite, poetry, began to blossom as spoken-word poetry in 1996, so when I was laid off in 1997, I spent all of that year and a good part of 1998 writing and performing spoken-word poetry. Even though I was a "starving artist" doing the best I could on Unemployment, I never felt more alive and invigorated than when I was on-stage reciting the deep, strong, gentle, passionate, social, political, intelligent, sexual, spiritual things I wrote. I was being myself. Nevertheless, the real challenge came when my Unemployment funds ran out in 1998, and my income dropped to zero. Instead of coming to my senses and acknowledging that I was born to be an artist, and not to be an Information Technology professional, I shoved my artistic life back into the hobby-closet and sought another IT job, this time as a Systems Analyst with the City of Los Angeles, beginning at the Public Works' Bureau of Accounting in the Fall of 1998. The job was still a struggle, not just to maintain my knowledge of computers, but also to relate with groups of people I was never supposed to meet in the first place. My artistic temperament, emotional as it was, eventually got me into trouble with those co-workers, primarily because such temperament simply didn't belong in that kind of work environment. I suffered disciplinary action during the Summer of 2001, where I was also shut out of the office and placed on leave for three months. While I was on leave, I indulged in even more artistic endeavors, including music composition on a MIDI keyboard, sketching and computer graphics, and (of course) spoken-word poetry. When I was allowed to return to work, my co-workers and supervisors treated me with even more contempt than ever before, and they let me know in no uncertain terms that I was despised beyond measure. Except for the handful of people that actually befriended me, the rest were on a mission to erase me completely. My supervisors then forced me to do heavy work without back support, and in the Spring of 2002, I injured my lower back on the job. While I was on Disability, I hired an attorney to defend me. And I was very glad I hired that attorney, because in the Fall of 2006, when I returned to the same job with the work-restrictions imposed by my attorney, the same supervisors violated those restrictions, forced me to do similar difficult work, and re-injured my lower back in the early Spring of 2007, placing me back on Disability. I was on Disability for a total of seven years, and I was being paid as much as I would have been paid while on the job. And while I was on Disability for those seven years, I had the unbridled freedom to pursue my artistic talents once again. I composed several albums on that MIDI keyboard, thoroughly indulged myself in sketching and computer graphics, and wrote numerous new poems to recite as spoken word. But even then, in all that time, I still didn't pursue any of my artistic talents as an actual career, and the talent I gave the least attention to was singing. Instead, fuelled by my misinterpretations of a book I was reading called "Rich Dad Poor Dad," written by Robert Kiyosaki, I took on Vocational Rehabilitation to learn how to be a business entrepreneur, yet another field I was simply not gifted with. When I started this training in 2008, it was around the time a major economic deficit hit the entire nation, forcing many small businesses to permanently close their doors. While I was writing my business plan as my final examination for the online course I was taking, I reacted to the deficit, I froze, I lost my determination, I kept drawing blanks, I flunked out of the entire Vocational Rehabilitation program, and I went back to work for the City of Los Angeles in the Fall of 2009, but in an entirely different department than where I started in 1998. I regained my Systems Analyst job at the City's Information Technology Agency, where I started on the Citywide Helpdesk and then planned on moving up later on. But my plans at ITA were cut short when the same wave of economic hardship that hit the private sector in 2008 finally struck the government sector in the Fall of 2010. ITA was horrendously downsized, I was laid off, and per City Policy, I was transferred back to the same group of people I started with back in 1998, Public Works. The only difference was the Bureau in Public Works. In 1998, I started with the Bureau of Accounting. This time, in 2010, it was the Bureau of Sanitation. And from there, I was transferred to Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant, where I have been working to this day.
        My IT career has all but dead-ended here at Hyperion. In addition to being surrounded by wastewater chemists, who were experts in a field that was even more alien to me than that of computers, I was still at best mediocre when it came to IT. And because the daily commute to and from Hyperion has gradually worsened as traffic congestion continues to mercilessly and exponentially increase, I spend far more time and energy dealing with the road than I ever do dealing with my job responsibilities or my increasingly obscured artistic talents, which (talents) were once again shoved back into the hobby-closet. Ever since 1983, I labored under the horrific misapprehension that making a ton of money and getting rich were the be-all and the end-all. That materialistic greed-centered thinking spurred me on to going after the wrong college degree, the wrong career, and the wrong Vocational Rehabilitation training. I should have realized early on that my value as a human being has absolutely nothing to do with being rich, and that my innate talents have absolutely nothing to do with insane quests for wealth. I should have sought after a career that reflected my natural-born gifts, not because it was the most financially profitable thing to do, but because it was the RIGHT thing to do. Nevertheless, these truths really didn't begin to sink into my inner paradigm until my mother suddenly died on May 27, 2014, and then my father died on February 1, 2015. The death of both parents, immediately followed by the death of my good friend and church elder Robert Holeman on January 30, 2016, and then the death of my dear friend and ex-girlfriend Jewel Allen on June 16, 2016, forced me to seriously rethink everything about my life, and I mean EVERYTHING. (Before my father died, he made me promise that I would use my singing voice in a professional manner, and I will honor that promise, even if it's the last thing I ever do.) I have learned the hard way, costing me thirty-four years of my natural life, that only a fool chases after wealth and riches. You are NEVER supposed to chase after wealth and riches: when you live the life you were born to live, and fulfill the talents you were born to fulfill, wealth and riches will chase after you. In fact, the more you chase after wealth and riches, the POORER you will become, first in your very soul, and then in your material possessions (or lack thereof). I am not saying that one shouldn't learn how to be wise with his or her money, nor am I saying that one shouldn't be financially literate. What I am saying is that one should not ever pursue money as though it were the most important thing in life, and that one should not ever worship money like a god.
        Ultimately, I have learned that the talents I was born with, and neither the talents that looked awesome to me nor the talents I thought would make me rich, should have been the talents that shaped my career. All of the awesome-looking talents and the so-called wealth-building talents, none of which came naturally to me, were only meant to be nothing more than hobbies. Now, as I move forward, I have the enormous responsibility of uprooting the thirty-four years of my adult life built upon a computer hobby that should not have ever been my career, and then replacing that corrupt foundation with one consisting of my natural-born vocal, musical, artistic, poetic, literary, and dramatic talents as my permanent career. I seriously need to achieve this before I get too old to find my wife and have children of my own. And I absolutely cannot afford to be set in my ways, since nearly all of them are based on a thirty-four-year-old error.
        (I have also come to realize that my foundational dilemma may have far more profoundly esoteric consequences than I had originally imagined, especially with regards to current events in American politics. In my recent studies of the Seven Hermetic Principles, I learned that the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence not only applies to "above" and "below," but also to past and future, inner being and outer being, and so on. Coupling that with the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism, I came to the profound realization that my dilemma, allowing selfishness and greed to plant my adult career on the wrong foundation, has become identical to America's dilemma, in that this entire nation originally allowed the selfishness and greed of European colonialism to plant her on a foundation of white supremacy, land theft, and slavery. And even as I am struggling against my old foundation in my efforts to plant myself onto a new and correct one, America is struggling against her old foundation of racism, bigotry, and white supremacy in her efforts to plant herself onto a new and correct foundation of equality, human rights, civil rights, mutual respect, brotherhood for all, and sisterhood for all. Nevertheless, with regards to President Donald Trump, the Republican-majority Congress, and the Republican-majority Supreme Court, all of which appear to be an outright backlash against the previous Obama Administration, this may also be a warning to me that during this struggle of change, my old foundation may cause me as much bitter, hostile torment as America's old foundation is causing her.)

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