Ethan Turon

My life has been marred by tragedy, misfortune, and letdown - I'm not ignorant to that fact, but that has never stopped me from being a happy, positive person, from smiling, and always attempting to leave the world better than it ever treated me.

There is not one person to this day who has ever come into my life that didn't take advantage of me in some way, shape, or form. This is why I have had to teach myself to be self-reliant, ambitious, determined, focused, confident, honest, true, compassionate, and motivated; To have utmost patience, to love animals, to persue knowledge, education, science, the arts, and a myriad of difficult concepts. I'm constantly aware that my human life has never been worth very much to anyone, but that the knowledge I've acquired, and the insights that my life experiences have granted me have been valuable enough that others try to steal it - and I say here that the success of others has never threatened my own. I am a giver by nature, but when my gifts are stolen, my giving must cease.

I was born in the mid-80's in Chicago, Illinois; a first generation hispanic-american. I had no say in the matter so please don't judge me for that, but I would choose me again if I could, and I thank my parents for my life. It is also extremely important to note in these current, dangerous times, that my mother was already a U.S. citizen for half a decade before I was born in Chicago, Illinois. No one will be taking our citizenship away. Not the president, not I.C.E., not the racists.

My family lived on Karlov Avenue in crown town when I was born. The first memory I have is of my father throwing a toy plastic chair at me to stop me from running away from him. By the time I was 4 years old, my father was murdered in an episode of Chicago gun violence, after an altercation at a fourth of July party. I apologize to my father that the police didn't care or look too hard for his murderer, and this case is officially unsolved -although my family knew the identity of the murderer. Due to this, I taught myself to shave later in my adolescence, the importance of hard work, love, and respect for others as well as oneself, and how to be prepared.

After the murder, my mom moved us to a house on Parkside Avenue in the Belmont-Craigin neighborhood of Chicago. Something happened to me at the hands of a female babysitter, but after that, when I was 6 years old, that house, which was my mom's labor of love and a symbol of peace after the murder, caught fire. It was en vogue to construct the front of your house with those big thick glass cubes, so my mom had created a whole glass face to the house, and when the firefighters arrived, they attacked that glass face. I watched our house burn, while my mom cried.

What had happened was that the rooms in the basement were furnished and rented out. One of the tenants left an electric heating blanket plugged in, and it caught fire. Then, the fire rose with the heat throughout the rest of the house. Safety switches hadn't been invented yet for these kinds of electronics. This is another way technology informed my life.

As a result of the house fire, my family moved to Deerfield, Illinois the following year, and I started first grade at Prichett Elementary School in Buffalo Grove, Illinois. In 2025, My mom told me that during those years in Deerfield, she encountered immense racism, which led to financial struggle. Determined, resillient, confident, and motivated, my mom moved us to Buffalo Grove, Illinois when I was about 9, almost 10 years old. My mom would take me with her to garage sales and thrift stores seeking hidden gems for that house where I lived for 25+ years. Between 1st and 9th grade, I was the only bilingual spanish speaker in my whole school district.

It was then, right in the aisles of those stores, that I started taking apart old computers and teaching myself where the pieces went, what the cables were, and how to get a machine running again. I remember a man, probably an employee, watching me and telling me "thats broken". I told him "no it's not" and got that machine booted to "Format Hard Disk". This comes to bare later. Reading back on this now, I realize that the first 10 years of my life were actually about 20 years dense. This recurring phenomenon in my life is exactly why my mental age is about 20-30 years ahead of my physical age.

in 1994, we were also taking 'typing' class in school -which was on Apple II computers! There were only like 4 or 5 computers, and we would take turns going to the little computer room in groups. They would cover our hands with a cardboard cover thing, so you couldn't see your hands on keys. That's where I learned homekeys, what the little bumps mean on your F and J key, and mastering a keyboard. At home, my mom had an old Brothers electronic typewriter, and I was allowed to practice on that because it didn't need paper. In that computer room at school, there were boxes of floppy disks nearby, so I would slide them in and try to see what the programs were before being caught and reprimanded. I knew how to run the programs from C:. There was a weather program which I used to learn hot and cold fronts and the different kinds of clouds such as -from memory as I type this- nimbus, cumulonimbus (rain clouds), stratus, cirrus. Theres more but the names change based on cloud elevation and appearance. There was oregon trail, there was an Alphabet game which I saw I was clearly too old for, and there was a maze game.

The rules were never the same for me, you see. What was always given to my classmates and colleagues (i.e. knowledge, education) was often suppressed for me by the adults, partners, and leaders I was supposed to trust. What was expected of me was always made more difficult by design. I remember poignantly that I was sent to the counselor sometimes while the rest of the class did science experiments and math quizzes. I remember this because I would look forward to those experiences, but when the time came I was sent away. I always saw it as being punished, and then I was further punished at home about it. So, I learned that I always had to create my own opportunities, that nothing would be given to me, and to seek knowledge on my own. Later, I learned that people don't always like that, either.

When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I brought my own filntstones vitamins to take at lunch. I wanted to grow strong and healthy. "Big" never mattered to me (great movie, though). Some kids in my class took the bottle from me and said I gave it to them. The school tried to expel me for that. I didn't even know what happened or what that meant, but I remember going with my mom several times at night to the school where she met with the staff. My mom tried to force me to understand that it wasn't about the vitamins.+ I don't know what happened, but I wasn't expelled. Actually, later that year, I was selected for some kind of inclusion assembly thing that felt contrived. I think that is when I really started to understand what was happening to me, as well as around me, and that my mistakes were extremely costly, and more severe than those of my peers. This was a theme for the rest of my life.

That summer, I got to keep one of those "Format Hard Disk" computers from the thrift store, and I begged my mom to take me to "computer shop" in the Plaza Verde shopping strip in Arlington Heights, Illinois. I would see the store sign glowing at me on the road when we went places and always wanted to go in there. Finally, she did take me and shyly, but wanting to learn and not waste my mom's time, I asked the guy there to teach me how to format a hard disk. He taught me, and I had to go back a few times, but I learned on DOS. Disk Operating System. So now, I was able to put together a computer and get it running to C:. I was about 10 years old by then.

In 5th or 6th grade, the school tried to force me to take ritalin, but I would spit it out. I think my mom went along with it because she was overly trusting of the school's "authority". This was also part of the ritalin explosion of the 90's, and they told me it's because I was hyper, but I never believed that. In fact, it's because of that incident that I've never taken pills, even aspirin. Even today. It's just not my thing. I can drop clean right now as you read this, no hesitation. I thank the gods as well, because I never needed to take pills or medication, I don't have ailements, I stay out of the sun, and I try to eat clean or cook for myself. Health is wealth, they say.

That's one of the reasons I've always been so proud of one of my careers in pharmacy; I always saw myself as protecting those drugs in the dispensation of community care.

When I was almost 12, I started working, and would get paid 35 dollars a month to walk an elderly lady's dog after school. I would buy a thin crust pizza from Rosatis, cassette tapes from Sam Goody, and computer disks with assorted software on it. Sometimes those disks had games, sometimes calculators and kinds of spreadsheet programs. They were early business applications which are now in a suite dominated by Microsoft, but back then, none of those tools were really licensed, so it was like "Bob's Tools v1.0" printed with a label maker on the disk. I liked the word processing programs because I could write much faster than my scribbly hand-writing, and some of the fonts like WingDings could be code. So, I would write coded messages and riddles for my friends, then if they had a computer, they could decode it. I remember asking to use my computer to write assigments, and being denied. I would use computer metaphors and lexicon in class, and would get marked down for it. PCs were only starting to become mainstream then, and not everyone had one. Adults told me they were toys and had no real future. They told my mom the same thing, and I think thats one reason why she never supported my interests in IT, bless her.

In late 1995, I wanted to upgrade to windows 3.5 because we were starting to get assignments on computers in school. No, they were not take home assignments. I found another thrift store PC that had windows on it already. I think a friend gave me the windows3 disks. In school, we had started using CD-roms and encarta online, which was a kind of educational internet but it wasn't mosaic or netscape. Even though the libraries now had like 30 computers in them, only a few were 'online'. The assignments were citation-based where we had to find a source online to answer the questions or do a report, and then use correct citation for the online source. Online source didn't mean internet at the time, though. It simply meant digital. We also figured out how to put Doom2 and Maze games on these computers, so I would boot the computer faster by only launching necessary programs on start, finish my project, and have the rest of the time to play doom or mazes if I was allowed, or just browsing.This is how I discovered debug and developer modes, which led me to learning HTML. It looked like what I had been doing with wingdings, so I understood the concepts intuitively. A kind of online job board also led me to do one of my first computer jobs for a record store. I don't remember being paid. It was just a "can anyone do this" job. I walked there on the train tracks, and did the job on their computer. It was basically a site map.

When I was 13, I started working at a pizza shop, not rosatis. A friend had the job but he told me he quit, so I went to ask for the job. It was just taking orders, but while I was on the computer I was able to see the source code for this pizza order program. It was made in Visual Basic. So, at home, I was teaching myself VB by creating Warez and punter proggies on AOL off of this pizza shop program. By 1996, Diablo had come out, and because of my experience in HTML and now VB, I partnered with a Warcraft 2 guild leader that was in high school to create geocities websites for the guild. I wasn't allowed to create guild pages for other guilds because it was against my own guild rules, but I helped them anyway. While other kids were sneaking comics or playboys, magic cards, or pogs in school, I was writing HTML on paper. Later, at home, I would transcribe my code (we called it scripting or programming then) into geocities or altavista IDE (integrated development environment). Around this time, something happened to me again, at the hands of a distant counsin. After that, I stayed inside all summer working on computers and staying focused on all of this script that I could combine with Pure Imagination
By then, age 13, I knew Information Technology and Computer Science was my calling in this mortal life. I knew I would never be allowed to be president or ceo, but that I could always work on computers.

Since my mom didn't believe in my interests in IT, I used netzero to get online at home, and a friend made me a screen name or shared theirs. Thanks for that, Alina! The problem was that I would be up all night long, or as long as I could stay up, just searching for tutorials and teaching myself web design, simple software programming, and digital art (shout out to adobe cs. rip.). I would get in trouble for this and the modem cords would get cut, or my computer would get taken away. IT was fun, and it nourished me, it satisfied me in a way I could only otherwise find in my relationships with girls. By 1997, I was an all-out digital pirate, sailing all the seas of cyberspace armed with Windows 95, mp3s, havok warez (LOL), and Photoshop. Here, my ship entered the Land of C and object-oriented programming as I learned about RATs (Remote Access Trojans) and worms. We would infect each other with rats and worms using Sub7 and ICQ while experimenting with what was early cybersecurity at the time. About the only thing we were securing was our cyberattacks on each other. If anything, the security arose in the defensive techniques of these "proggie warz" we were conducting online; burning hard drives, highjacking access, port and packet sniffing, cloning. We were kids; It was a game to us like globalthermal nuclear war, and your handle could garner notoriety based on your hacky exploits or pirate services. I still use my same handle today as I did back then at 15. So, when my mom would cut the phone cords with a knife, I would buy myself a bunch of extra cords to replace and keep going. It was a blessing when 56.6kbps modems came with audio toggles for late night computing, not that I miss modem sounds, anyway. There wasn't even a phone outlet in my room. I drilled a hole into the corner of the floor in my room and fed something like a 60 foot phone cord under my house and into the next room that did have a phone cord. Incidentally, this is how I found out that the floors of houses have several layers.

When I was 16, I developed a precursor to facebook and myspace, but it was only for my school. The idea was the same; everyone in the school got their own little page to log in and post little messages on their pages for others to see. I had populated everyone's page based off of the yearbook. I didn't have anyone to trust to help me develop it further or commercialize it either, but I understood that "social media" was on the horizon. I understood that I was the next generation of leaders in Information Technology.

Within a few years of that, I had graduated high school, started working in community pharmacy, moved out on my own, became a legal adult and started community college so I could stay in my hometown.

...And I went on with my life for the next 20 years, building my career and experience bases, utilizing global Information Technology to turn my vulnerabilities into strengths, and to turn my strengths into super powers, to master the concepts of providing stillness in a chaotic world, clarity of wisdom, deception detection, and servant leavership; to be an honest man even when it hurts, and to offer loyalty unmatched. I always do what I say I will do. That is my bond as a man. I'm not a rebel, I'm not a rogue, I'm not a manipulator or a deceiver, and I'm not egotistical. Rather, I balance my ID, EGO, and Superego, and always consciously choose to help, to leave positive impacts, and to live a benevolent life, especially in the times when I haven't always been allowed to be myself.

That there is so much vulnerability and abuse in my early life is tragic, but I cannot tell my story and share my strengths without also sharing my vulnerabilities and suffrage. I believe that all of this adversity has helped prepare, streghten, and form me to be a greater good, a shining light, an IT Veteran - and as sure as I am a fluent spanish bi-lingual United States born American, that's how I feel in my heart.

If you would like to contact Me, you can email Me: hello@ethanturon.com

or check out my instagram

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