Chipmunks & Colonoscopies
I though for kicks I’d post my English essay for your reading pleasure. Feel free to tell me what you think about it…
Chipmunks and Colonoscopies
When I was eight years old I sang The Chipmunk Christmas song in front of my entire third grade class. I can still remember the look on Mrs. Swinko’s face as she raised her hands up in what I assume was some feeble attempt to get me to sing louder. I wish I could say that was the exact moment I knew I wanted to be a performer, but it wasn’t. Twenty years later I find myself writing an introduction to an educational essay in an English 101 class, a.k.a., a general ed. requirement for the nursing degree I am pursuing. And though I am currently working towards a future in nursing, it’s my past experiences in dramatic arts that have led to my current desire of being a performer.
When I think of elementary school I think of gum drops & red cards. The well behaved kids got gum drops, & I got red cards. I wasn’t a bad kid, I was just social. Trading Transformers and G.I. Joes in the back of class with Steven Bueno, passing love notes to Lacy Chenoweth, etc. I got ok grades. I never got held back or anything, but I wasn’t a straight A student. I mostly excelled at being a clown, & having fun. Sixth grade camp was a blast! I remember entering the talent contest with my friends Jamie and Antoine. We did a silly skit about a kid getting eaten by his giant pet worm during a routine feeding session. I was the kid, Jaime, Antoine, & some big brown sheets were the worm. We won a prize.
My memories of Jr. High & High School are mostly of making friends that I still see today. My favorite parts of the day were; before school, recess, lunch, after school, & the many passing periods throughout the day. You never knew who you were going to run into on the way from one class to the next. In high school Mrs. Carr suggested that I audition for the school play, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. She said I’d be good in the role of Dogberry. Dogberry was the crazy town sheriff who rode around on a non-existent horse & was constantly making an ass out of himself. Either Mrs. Carr was trying to tell me something, or she just thought I’d be good in the comic relief role. The play ended up being scrapped but I remember the rehearsal process was fun. It consisted of hanging out with friends after school & goofing off, the only difference was we were still at school. In my senior yeah I took a drama class, one hour a day of being silly with friends. I loved it, mostly because it was an easy A, but also because it was a lot of fun.
When I graduated from San Diego High I immediately started taking classes at City College. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew that once you got out of high school you were supposed to go to college. So I went through the motions & enrolled in Math, English, & Speech. I ended up dropping English & Speech because I didn’t see how they were going to be relevant in my future, more on that later. One class that I didn’t drop out of was Theater Performance & Production. Over the next several years I helped produce, & preformed in over a dozen City College productions. One of the first productions I was in at City College was West Side Story. I remember the final dress rehearsal. It was our first time performing for an audience, & when we finished singing the Jet Song we were supposed to hold our pose & wait for the crowd to stop cheering. I remember standing there with my arms in the air, out of breath, holding my position, waiting & waiting for the crowd to stop cheering, thinking to myself, this is awesome! That’s when I knew I wanted to be a performer. I toyed with the idea of acting professionally but didn’t take it too seriously. I was having too much fun to think about getting stressed out because I couldn’t find paying work as an actor. In fact, acting at City College cost me money, because I had to enroll as a student in each performance. I didn’t mind though because I loved it so much.
I had several jobs through the years but none of them were related to anything I was learning in school. I never took a class on how to clean a frozen yogurt machine, or make a Jamba Juice smoothie, or sell merchandise to tourists, but these were the jobs I was working. It was while I was working at the San Diego Zoo that I switched from acting to music. I had a lot of performance experience under my belt, a guitar that my dad bought me in seventh grade, & I had been spending a lot of time at the yogurt shop writing lyrics. So one day while working at the zoo I started writing a song about my job. I would tear off pieces of register tape & write about the things that I dealt with while working in the gift shops; long lines, angry mothers, broken snow-globes, exchanging this shirt for that shirt, & all the while keeping a smile on my face. Many of my co-workers saw me writing on the register tape & wondered what I was up to. Eventually there was some buzz about the song & a lot of my coworkers were asking me when they were going to hear it. I decided to play it at an upcoming employee party. The night of the party I brought my guitar, & once everyone had gathered into the living room I played the song. The song is about three minutes long but it probably took about 10 minutes to play because I had to keep waiting for everyone to quit laughing before I could move on to the next line. It was a great feeling. It reminded me of how I felt on stage during that final dress rehearsal for West Side Story, except this time it was all my own. I wrote it, I performed it, I owned it, but more importantly I didn’t have some crazy director yelling at me to “bring it up!!”.
I continued writing songs and once I had about a dozen I started going out to open mics around town. That was about four years ago. I’m now playing paid gigs on a regular basis. As I have stated several times in this English class I’ve got a show every Thursday night at Café Libertalia. 3834 5th Ave. 8PM. $5, free for classmates. I’m allowed to promote my shows in this essay right? While I do play paid gigs regularly, it’s not enough money to warrant me quitting my day job at this point. I’m no longer at the San Diego Zoo. I’ve been working at Scripps Mercy Hospital for the last six years. The last four in particular have been in the Endoscopy unit, home of the world famous colonoscopy among other procedures. It’s a pretty interesting job to say the least. I think it’s kind of fun. I get to operate all kinds of gadgets and I’m actually involved in the procedures. I do all sorts of things, ranging from taking biopsies, to passing wires into the common bile duct, dilating strictures to crushing gall stones using a device called the Stone Crusher. I’ve also had to remove a toothbrush, two paint brushes, and three plastic spoons all from the same patient’s stomach. Let’s just say that this patient liked to swallow things. Since I was so intrigued by these procedures I was always the first to volunteer to participate in them. Eventually I found myself training some of the nurses I was working with, nurses that were making twice as much as me. Eventually I decided to go back to school and get on the wait list for the nursing program. The Human Resources dept. at my hospital spoke very highly of City’s nursing program, and since I’d spent so much time there already I kind of felt it’s where I was supposed to be.
Now that I’m back at City, with a goal in mind, and now that I know the exact route I need to take in order to get there it makes things a lot easier. Since the classes I’m taking now are actually related to the things I’m doing at work it’s a lot easier to follow along. I feel now that I’m learning by choice and desire, and not simply because it’s what I’m supposed to do. In Malcolm X’s essay “Learning To Read” he asserts that with knowledge and the desire to satisfy your curiosity comes great power. He says that “I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with collages is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that” (251). X’s point is that with all of those distractions the curiosity you seek to satisfy might not be related to an education. In my case the curiosity I sought to satisfy involved Lacy Chenoweth circling a box telling me weather or not she liked me. I still get distracted on occasion. But now instead of love notes I write love songs. Last year I wrote a song for a girl named Jackie in my Chemistry class. She was a distraction, a short sexy distraction. But since the classes I’m taking now are related to something I want to do, it’s a lot easier to “multi-task”. Coincidentally English and Speech are two classes that I dropped ten years ago and they are the two classes I’m currently enrolled in. Had I known what I wanted to do 10 years ago I wouldn’t have dropped those classes, but I also know that my essay wouldn’t have been called Chipmunks and Colonoscopies ten years ago, and I’m glad that it is today.
So while I type away trying to fill a four to five page quota I keep in mind that I want to succeed in this class and all classes I take because I want the knowledge I obtain to be beneficial to me in my future nursing career. I also keep in mind that if a distraction comes along and I’m inspired I must take advantage of that inspiration because inspiration comes and goes and I’ve learned as a writer that you need to strike while the iron’s hot. You never know which girl, or “distraction” is going to inspire the song that makes you famous.