Topic: Autobiography: Ivan Cole

Ivan Cole

Date: 2011-01-08 02:35 EST
It's difficult to go to school for so long. Hard to maintain a healthy balance between work, play, and study. It's hard to save up enough to avoid having to rely solely on financial aid. But it's pretty satisfying.

I grew up in Texas, oddly enough. I say oddly because I don't think I really fit in well with the idea of what people see when they think of a Texan. I'm pretty tall, sure, and stubborn as hell, but I think the similarities end there.

My father's name was Virgil. He was a good man, not the brightest, but he always did what he thought was right. He was also very supportive and can be easily credited for starting me on my current path when I was a young teen. Now, when tourists think Texas they think of westerns. Of tall mustached men with cowboy hats working on ranches or hunting deer.

My dad worked in an office building; he was the service for some small company that sold printers, currency counters, and other kinds of bank equipment. He was pretty tall, too, and he did have a mustache, but a goatee came with hit. He also had a pair of Ostrich skin boots and a matching belt. Hideous things, but he loved them.

The older he got the more Texan he appeared.

He encouraged the guitar playing and the reading and the writing I did when I was growing up, and it's thanks to him that I'm well on my way to achieving those long-term goals I used to hear about when speaking with the guidance counselors at the community college. He was a good man, firm in his beliefs but respectful of others, to a certain extent.

He always tried his best in discussions of religion and politics to be gentle with his words, so as not to offend anyone. It was comical at times, but I look back on some of our discussions with a smile. I'm an atheist. I came to the realization sometime around my junior or senior year of high school. I told him first, because he was my dad, and I told him everything.

He was my best friend after all.

I told him about my beliefs, or lack thereof, and asked him about his. He told me he believed in God, which I expected of course, and we discussed it. It was a very strained conversation, I could tell he wanted to tell me I was being stupid and that I should believe in God and all that nonsense. But, to his credit, he never interrupted me. I can't say I was so respectful at the time, I'd often interject with snide remarks and little quotes from the Bible that I believed contradicted his words.

He said I should be a lawyer or something, because I came so close to convincing him that his beliefs had been false.

At the time I was pretty proud of myself. I feel bad about it now, though, like I was forcing him to accept something he didn't want to, or didn't think was the truth.

I've always done my best since those early debates to be respectful about things like that.

Moving on to my mother.

She was different from my dad in just about every way except taste in music. He was older than her when they got together, and both where in high school when I was born. Both also dropped out, but my dad went back a few years later after getting his life in order.

My mom never seemed to do that. I loved her, for all her faults, but I often hated her, too. She liked to party, more than I ever have, and was a far wilder spirit than I ever will be. She would go out all night at bars and not come back until well into the morning, or would DJ at places and get free drinks from the drunks there.

She was pretty, she had red hair and brown eyes and people say I looked a lot like her when I was younger, but grew into my dad's features as I grew up. She was also the loudest person I knew, and had one of the hardest lives, too.

Her father was a drug addict and a drunk. She loved him, but she hated him. He used to abuse my grand mother, whom I lovingly referred to as Nana, until he was shot one day during what I've come to discover was an argument with a drug dealer. I never met him.

Nana was a harsh woman; she made her daughters work from an early age and didn't take a lot of nonsense. You'd figure that kind of discipline would breed healthy adults, but looking at my mom and her sisters, I think only one really turned out completely right.

I used to sit with Nana for hours and talk about this and that, about the latest thing my mom did to piss my next childhood ambition or me off after I became a superhero or what have you. I cherished those moments with her. She was a wonderful woman.

She died of cancer when I was sixteen.

That was just one of the hard blows to my mother's life. She had a string of abusive boyfriends that never seemed to end, and always ended up leaving the few good guys she ever met or pissing them off with her aggressive attitude.

She was a mean drunk when she's around people and a sad drunk when she's around me, unless we discussed my dad. Then she was down right evil.

But she did her best to be good to me, and I did love her. And I do miss her.

Her and my dad both wanted me to finish high school, so I did; they wanted me to go to college, though my mom insisted I start at a university instead of the community college. I went to community because it was closer, safer, I was still afraid of leaving home.

But after a while I left home, I went to a different school for several years and after finishing there, moved up north for many more years to attend a different university.

I spent a lot of my time studying abroad, and so I've learned French and Spanish, a healthy chunk of German and even a few bits of Romanian from a friend I made in Spain.

Then there was that time I went to Egypt, now that's a story.

Ivan Cole

Date: 2011-01-08 12:16 EST
My earliest memories are of my mother and father fighting. They hated each other and I can't help but think that the only reason they ever tried to stick together was for me. It's touching, but it's stupid, and I've told them that a couple of times over the years. Luckily, they split up when I was around three or four, but that did little to dispel the tension whenever they would meet for my birthday parties or what have you.

My dad won custody, which today I'm very thankful for. Don't get me wrong, I loved my mother and she loved me, but she was always getting fired and getting a new job, always moving, always seeing a different guy. Her life was a nonstop drama rollercoaster and that's no place to raise a kid. My dad moved in with my grandmother for the first few years after the divorce. We didn't really have a room, but slept in the den in front of door to the small house. There were no other rooms after all.

She had two dogs and we lived with my uncle who is only five years older than me. So growing up, he was often the big brother figure of my life. He's also a major influence for what I do today. My dad was into some bad things when I was a kid. He did cocaine and shot up a few times, and I remember waking up to the sounds of him having a seizure in front of me.

He quit when I was around ten or eleven and went to a trade school. After graduating he got a job at a Chuck E. Cheese's as a tech for the games there, and he worked there for several years until we got our own little apartment just down the road from my grandmother's place. Eventually his friend helped him get a job at the company he worked for until his death, shortly after he hooked up with a woman he'd known for years. They got married when he was fourty and she was thirty-nine.

Growing up, I didn't have many friends. I wasn't a handsome kid; I was kind of chubby and a bit crass. I lacked social confidence and I blame my dad for that, he coddled me, tried to make sure I didn't end up a screw up like he did during his teenage years. My elementary school years were the loneliest of my life, to be honest. I couldn't get along with other kids, no matter what I did. I often resorted to sitting by myself on swing sets until the playground bully came to kick me off or hiding beneath the wooden bridge in the playground that had a loose plank with an opening just wide enough for me to slip through.

I made good grades, though, and continued up until middle school. That's when I got my first taste of friendship. I met a couple of kids in my gym class and we all hit it off pretty fast. They enjoyed books and video games and anime and all things like that as much as I, so one of them invited me over to his house when they all were going to hang out for a weekend and eat junk food, play risk, and be about as nerdy as possible.

It was paradise.

Then high school came along. Two of them went to a different school and we lost contact after a year and the other turned into this sort of asshole that surprises me to this day. I went back to having no friends for the first half of my freshmen year until I met an older kid on the bus ride home. He was a big guy, I mean fat, like a marshmallow, and he was insanely cool. He was also oddly popular.

I talk to him a bit still.

Sophomore year came around and I was still in ROTC. I met a guy who was talking about Dungeons and Dragons to a kid I knew from elementary school. I asked him about it and he gave me some information that only piqued my interest further. So, when he invited me and the other kid over to teach us how to play, I said yes and went there later that day.

The rest of my high school career was spent with him, his friends who I met through the game, and a pair of brothers I met during my junior year who turned out to be my most long lasting friends to this day. But when I graduated I got a job and I went to college and I stopped seeing them as much and eventually I only ever saw the brothers, and it broke my heart to lose my friends like that, but I kept at it.

See, I lacked social confidence. But I was pretty damn certain of my intellectual aptitude, and I hated my job and I hated my city and I hated that I was the kid of a pair of dropouts who ended up living with their parents for several years after I was born. So I was determined to make something of myself, and eventually I got over my fear of leaving home and transferred to a university. It's there that my wings really started to spread, a lot happened during that first year.

Ivan Cole

Date: 2011-01-09 04:15 EST
I stayed in Green Hall, a dormitory on campus filled with art and music students. I remember walking through the first floor, which was a sort of common room area where people sat and talked and played their instruments and had an all around good time. I was immediately intimidated by the freedom they all had, by how easily they operated in this environment.

My room was on the fourth floor. Floors separated the guys and girls, the second was guys, third was girls, fourth guys, and so on. My room was shared with another guy named Kris who was an art student focusing on sculpting. He was pretty good and mostly kept to himself when we were in the room for the first few weeks I was there. He was new, too.

My first class was just an ensemble meeting for guitar, and I had toured the campus so many times with my uncle and parents that I knew exactly where to go. So I was early, as I've always tended to be when going to class or work. I spent a few minutes just sitting there watching people come and go, the old battered case that held my guitar was leaning against the wall beside me.

I had been in an ensemble in the community college I went to, though it was considerably smaller. There were three students and the instructor, but at the university there were ten of us and most of the students had been in the ensemble for a couple of years and knew each other fairly well, so once again I felt singled out as the awkward new kid.

I mostly just smiled and nodded hello when introductions were made and played my part when we decided to do a little bit of on the spot reading just to get the semester going. It was fun, I didn't do too bad, and when it was over I had an hour before I needed to go to my music theory class so I went to the courtyard after buying a coke and played my guitar for a while.

That's when I met James who ended up being my closest buddy while I was still studying in America. James was a music student also, but he played bass and noticed me because of the guitar. He walked over and sat down on the bench and talked to me a bit while I played, just the usual stuff. "Hi, how are you," etc.

He eventually told me that he played bass and that a buddy of his had a drum set and they were thinking about getting a little band together just for fun, and asked if I was interested.

Naturally, I was. I had always wanted to be in a band but my friends back home were never very musically inclined. So, I said yes and he told me where to meet them in a few hours then we both left to go to our different classes. I regretted my decision immediately, figuring the school was full of guitarists who were way better than I was and far more qualified for being in a band than me.

But I've never been good at standing anyone up, no matter the situation. Guilt always gets the better of me.