Finally my father and Snoop Dogg have something in common

And it’s not their ability to lyrically flow over a beat or their affinity for marijuana.  Recently Snoop Dogg’s son Cordell quit the UCLA football team.  He did so because he wanted to pursue his passion for film through his company Film School Productions.  It’s not my Speilbergian director skills either that bond all of this together. It’s just a dad who really wanted his son to do something, but his son didn’t want to.

I don’t know Cordell or Snoop Dogg. I don’t know what either of their true passions are in life. Cordell quit the football team, but will remain a student at UCLA. Prior to that, they were the subject of an ESPN series called Snoop & Son: A Dad’s Dream. Perhaps it could be the headline of the show, but I suspect that Cordell wanted to do what he wanted, rather than what his father was pushing him to do.

I don’t consciously remember my dad pushing me to be an architect, but for some reason that’s what I went into high school trying to be.  I took all of the drafting classes that I could, drew some 3D side view widgets and had an OK time at it, but it gradually faded away. I don’t remember how I told him, or even if I did, he may have just figured it out when I stopped taking all of the drawing equipment with me to school.

My mom wanted me to be a Speech Language Pathologist. She wanted me to, but she never told me what the degree was or what they did. “They help people speak” is all I remember her telling me. In a way her suggestion would’ve been helpful in diagnosing our youngest child with his Apraxia. But, had I majored in SLP I would’ve gone down a different path and the space/time continuum, much less our two children might not have been here.

When I was young enough to start thinking about what I wanted to be I remember telling my mom that I wanted to be a vet. To a kid a vet and a veteran can be confusing. “Why do the doctors for cats and dogs have their own special day”, I wondered. I wanted to be a vet, despite the fact that the only pets in the family was a crow and some fish that dad took care of.

“Are you sure, you have to kill animals, give them shots and take blood.  Are you sure?”, she said.

My mom was not down with the animals, obviously.  So those words to an impressionable 8 (I think) year old scuttled my career as a vet, in hindsight I would’ve been a fabulous vet.

However, this is not revisionist history, it happened, I moved on and other things like a college degree in communication took its place.

Good luck to Cordell, I don’t know if he have any talent as an actor or director. It could also simply be his desire to escape his famous father’s shadow, either way, best of luck with your future in communications.  He may also want to consider a career as a vet, it’s much more stable and he’s already got the last name for it.