orange to blue

Like those congressmen, title to be inserted later…

…only to never be inserted.

alright, well, with new characters and a new chapter/drastic change in scenery warrants a post for records sake. these gov folks have gotten to me so soon! It might be important one day to have a log as to why it is i have decided to leave my phd program for a little while and always looming is the possibility of never returning…

why did i just drop everything and take this chance to come to our nation’s capital? i didn’t want to tell very many people before, but now that i am actually here and actually working, i am ok with it: it was to see if a me and a him had a chance to be an us. However, i just saw said person for the first time since arriving 3 weeks ago and no sparks or tension. and i am ok with that. really, i am. I have met lots of new people and I love this town and I was and am able to hold my own.

And there was also the fact that i was not as happy that i would have hoped i would be by this point in my life. i have no idea how we get such strange expectations but i thought that i’d be over shooting it by wanting to be successful at 26. i mean in hs people were talking about doing so at 23!? but as johan lehrer said, these days people do not become accomplished until well into their 40′s! no, i think that what i really wanted was to have figured out my life. to have decided on a career, to perhaps have been seriously dating someone. maybe settled on a locale. or if not any of these things at least could foresee all of it happening in the next 4 yrs. and there in lies the problem. i don’t.

But randomly as fate would have it, I was given this amazing opportunity and there really was no way i could turn it down! but each day i think: what do i want out of this? I like it now, but i also liked lab research when I was a summer research assistant. what is different about my thinking now than how i thought then? I had no idea then the culture of academia. am i also not seeing the true culture of government?

I want to do a good job, and i know that it all depends on who you know. it is a little bit superficial. i just had a conversation today with a girl that repeated the same shallow point 50 million times and yet the other person just kept drawing it all in. I do admit, she was very well spoken, but she really lacked depth other than the one topic she consistently honed in on. Her contribution to the conversation was pretty limited. But here is what makes me sad, because she is so well spoken, she will get the opportunities that I cannot smooch my way into. example: she worked for Whitesides. I know Blue, you don’t know who he is…he is a very famous, top-notch, well-known chemist. Serious name dropping doors open type thing. crazy. but what can you do about that?

so why am i so ambitious? this is a topic we might have thought about before on the blog. but it comes back recently because of a new character. ah! we need a nickname for the new victim. The only philosopher i remember is Hume. but i don’t think i particularly agreed with him. idk, what philosophers do you remember? Basically he has questioned the reason for science. WHAT?! i give my reasons that i have been developing since the age of 5 when i learned the word science. and he just kept asking why? how do i get characters like this? Spud would do that same thing to me. not about science but the consistent philosophical questioning.  i can’t get the new guy out of my head. not only because he has made me question philosophically why i do science, but also we’ve had conversations about communicating, how i perhaps don’t do such a good job of that, and how he got things out of me i wouldn’t have shared. of which i am annoyed because clearly he also does not communicate his feelings. because i’m confused. and stubborn. I will not call.

sigh, i might tomorrow. i stand by wanting to be stubborn, but also i think: that is not how i want it to work in the future. if we were to perhaps have a future, i don’t want to have fights or scenarios where we’re both so prideful (for lack of a better word) in which we don’t communicate. i go back and forth. i know the importance of communicating (relationships are hard enough as it is) but then again i also want to be the one that is independent enough and stronger (its the feminist in me).

ok, well, if i write anymore i’m going to start to be even more incoherent than i am currently. which seems difficult to do, but trust me, it’s possible. hopefully this is enough of a description to glean thought processes in the future.