OBRA: The Art of Work

Aileen Del Riego

Director of Operations

I’m the director of operations of a privately owned dental practice. I had a really nontraditional journey to getting to my job. Before I started managing a dental practice I was teaching preschool, which actually is not very much different, as it turns out, than managing a dental practice. And then I was the director on the board of Wagging Dog Rescue, and that’s a volunteer position but it was a lot of dealing with different people and personalities and things that people are really passionate about. You just have to play into what people need, in that position. Same thing with the preschool that I worked at. It was kind of interesting because it’s a parent co-op preschool so I was the only teacher in the room and then I’d be working with three volunteer parents every day. It was the same 15 parents, because I had 15 kids, so it wasn’t like new people every day but it was on a rotating schedule and so managing all of that was a lot. I ran parent...

Regina DeMoville | Owner, Heart Captioning, Inc.

https://heartcaptioning.com/

A lot of people know court reporting as the lady sitting in the court with the little machine. A normal keyboard, the average is like 40, 50, 60 words per minute. On this, our average is 200 words per minute. In school, we start out in the beginning with theory and that’s where they teach you the keyboard. So, you notice that there’s no letters on the keys. The first thing that they teach you is which keys are what. They give you a little card stock picture of the keyboard that has the keys on it.

This is the left bank. This is the right bank. And then down here are the vowels. How it works is it’s phonetic, so the beginning sound of a word would be on the left side and then you have the vowel which would be like the middle part of the word. And then the right part would be the end. On here [regular keyboard], we would type cat, C-A-T. But there is no C on our keyboard. It’s K because it’s phonetic: it would be...

Christine Catipon
Clinical psychologist

I am a licensed psychologist, with a doctorate in clinical psychology. What that means is I provide talk therapy to people who want emotional support. I’m called Dr. Christine or Dr. Catipon or sometimes just Christine, because I don’t like emphasizing any power differential when I’m working with my clients. Some clients like to use “Doctor” in addressing me because of their cultural background or their respect for elders or professionals, so I’m comfortable with however they want to address me.

I’m a second-generation Filipino-American, and from a really early age, there was a lot of pressure to become a doctor. To my immigrant parents and extended family, it was all about coming here to the U.S. to give their kids a “better life.” What that looks like is financial success and being very affluent. So from kindergarten, I was told I was going to be a doctor. A medical doctor — that’s the only kind of doctor that they could acknowledge existed. But...

Maria Morris

Hypnotherapist | Embody Excellence Hypnotherapy

Both my parents are ministers. My dad is much more orthodox; my mother is unorthodox. Both Christian, two totally different perspectives on religion! My mother was the type that studied Eastern medicine, meditation, she took college classes for communication. My mother and dad have a 14-year age gap, so whereas my dad is very educated also, he was educated later. My dad’s the young one. So, she always taught us about the power of our thoughts, about healing, and I used to see her pray for people, lay hands on people… You know, the falling out, the stereotypical stuff of people falling all over the place and “You need a healing?” — that type of stuff. But you know what, I’ve seen people actually get healed in situations like that, as crazy and theatrical as it is — and looks — I realized that it’s all about the person who’s receiving and believing and that it can be any religion, as long as you have a belief system. The mind is...

Gabriela Parson
Ultrasound Technician

When I was 15 my father died. I had money in savings that he had left me for college, but my brothers took it. Because I was a minor on the account, they got my mom to sign off and little by little, all of it was gone. Then she took off and I had to fend for myself. So I was homeless for a time, but not like where I ever had to sleep in the street; I had to sleep in my car once. But mostly people’s couches that would take me in, strangers. I had never gone to college. When I met Chad, I was doing an associate’s degree but I wasn’t really sure what it was that I wanted to study. I wanted something stable. Having been through what I went through, I had suffered so much when I lived out in the streets and I never wanted to suffer again. So money was an important thing for me. But with my kids, it was hard to find time to go to school and I had to keep working in order to take care of the household.

When CJ was born, we decided for me to stay at home. He...

Pherlha Aguilar
Model and actress | Tijuana, Mexico
https://pherlhaa.wixsite.com/pherlhaaguilar

I was in school, I was like 15 years old I think, and my cousin was kind of handsome — he’s on TV right now here in TJ, locally. He got into an agency, he took a course in modelling. When he graduated, I went and the owner of that agency saw me and told me, “You should model, too.” And I was like, “Oh. I just came to see my cousin, but… ok!” So I ended up taking the course, entering the agency. They wanted to send me to Japan when I was like 16 and my mom was like, “Hell no, you need to finish something in school, some career or something.” I kept doing it, more on the side, and I stayed here doing campaigns, catalogues, stuff like that. I finished three careers — I have three bachelor degrees.

The first one is in international business from the university here in Baja. Then I moved to Mexico City for contract modelling. I was supposed to be six months in Mexico City and I ended up staying 10...

Liz McTan | Blogger, musician

https://www.facebook.com/echohillofficialband/

https://redheadedramblingmama.blog/

I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades in terms of artistry. I write for Orange County Moms Blog, so I’m a blogger, and I have my own blog called the Redheaded Rambling Mama. I owned a store for three years and we just closed it six months ago and then I do music as well. When I say it all out loud it sounds like a lot but when I feel it in my life it’s like, “Eh, it’s not that much stuff.” 

I went to FIDM from 2013 to 2015. I went back to school as an adult, at 28. I had been working in e-commerce doing copywriting for a long time and I just felt like I wasn’t moving and I wanted to do something a little more challenging. I wanted to get a degree — I’d never had one, I’d always done part-time school. I also have fibromyalgia, which is a big part of my life and why I do a bunch of weird stuff, instead of a full time job where you have to be there 40 hours a week and it’s a set schedul...

Jacki O. | The First Lady of Real Estate

http://www.jackio.com/

I met Beale — and it has something to do with Beale because that’s how I got here — I was 20 years old. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was going to junior college and the first thing I thought I was interested in was psychology. I started taking all these psychology classes and then I thought that’s not something I think I can do for the rest of my life. Then I took marketing. I thought marketing I could kind of use in anything. And then I don’t know, I guess I get bored too easy or something. I took almost a year of these classes. Junior college is only supposed to take two years… now I’m on my second year, and I switch to interior design. So I’m kind of flailing at this point. From 18 until I met my husband I had switched majors three times. He was a musician and he was passionate about music. We fell in love and I actually kind of thought I was going to dedicate my life to his music business.

He was moving forward wi...

Jen Buehler
Fertility Nurse

I did not originally want to be a nurse. My mom had suggested it to me while I was in high school, getting ready to go to college, like “You would be a great nurse.” And I was thinking, “No, all they do is wipe people’s butts and that’s it. And they clean up poop, and… no.” I had done physical therapy when I was in high school for an injury and I loved the biology and the medicine part of it but I thought, “Nurses don’t do anything that I am interested in.” I went to college and I was a bio major but I didn’t think I wanted to be a doctor, either. I specialized in physiology, which is functions of the body, and I took a reproductive biology class in college and scored the top of my class. It wasn’t just reproductive biology for humans, it was all animals, but there was something about it like, “Yes. I get this, it makes sense.”

What I thought was really interesting about it was I had girlfriends who would come to me asking me questions about their body. We’re...

Kasha Lassien
Professional make-up artist, Los Angeles, CA | www.makeupxkae.com

Makeup wasn’t the first thing that I wanted to get into. Art has always been something that has called to me, but it wasn’t something that I thought was realistic for a career. Especially with my family, everyone is an overachiever; they’re getting degrees and doing all this stuff so I felt like I had to go that route to please them or to keep up with what my brothers and sisters were doing. I would do my makeup all the time but I didn’t think that was something you could make a career out of. I would watch YouTube tutorials while I was in college studying psychology, I’d take a break and go out to the store and get all the products and then come back and finish my studies. I really fell in love with the art of transforming myself, so much so that I was like, “I’m going to see how I can make a career out of this.” There’s something called The Makeup Show which is like this big convention or trade show for pr...