Starting out

 Last night, a friend came to my house to just visit.  We had cake.  We talked about the past.  We talked about the future.  We talked, and it felt good - comfortable - no pretense.  While discussing the struggles he was having empathizing with his boyfriend's current situation, it was apparent to us that we needed to remember what the view of the world is like when you were making your first big life choices. We had to remember the weight of those choices, because we were unaware at the time which of those choices would be critical and which ones we would either forget we ever made, or we would look back on and laugh about the importance we gave them.

When I graduated college, I was proud to have gotten a degree in what I considered a hard science. Physics is a hard subject, but undergraduate programs in physics are preparing their students to pursue graduate programs in physics.  They are not preparing their students to become engineers.  The approach is perfectly reasonable since industry want's to hire someone who was trained to enter industry, with a set of skills for the industry, i.e. an engineer.  The school is training someone to think about more fundamental questions where we don't even know what we don't know.

At 22 years old with my degree in physics and 5 years of needling my engineering friends about how I was a scientist and NOT an engineer, I was completely unaware of what the world wanted or needed. I assumed that everyone would see my value as a scientist. I spent the next 5 years on a factory floor in a manufacturing facility. It was a wonderful experience.

I took a job in a manufacturing company after an intense search for a job.  I must have submitted resumes to dozens of companies. This was before the era of online applications, and internet searches.  At the time there was no world wide web.  I sought a position where I could use my advanced math and understanding of the fundamental laws of nature to derive whatever I needed, but after reading the job descriptions in rooms full of three ring binders, and going to job fairs carrying my resume from table to table, I began to realize that I needed to figure out what marketable skills I actually had.  I needed to figure out what I could do that the companies wanted, and how I could demonstrate that.  In the mean time, I continued to visit company offices in the area.  I had heard rejection so much that I didn't even ask if there were opening, I just asked that they put my resume on file and let me know if an opportunity became available. Finally, after driving around in miserable Texas heat for hours, and giving my standard line, the stand-in receptionist on duty at one of the companies asked me to wait. She was just filling in for the regular receptionist who would probably have just taken my resume and laid it on a stack.  Instead, as the executive assistant to the facility manager, she spoke to her boss, who offered to interview me on the spot if I had the time. As it happened, I did.  While waiting for the interview, I turned to another person in the lobby and ask, "So, what does this company actually do?"  I ended up taking the job. 

The point of my diatribe is not, as it might be assumed, that my persistence paid off, but rather, that my ignorance and ill-preparedness lead me to take a position that I new nothing about.  I had not done research during my undergraduate degree into what the world needed. I had not done research into what the company did.  I had not done research into what skills I could offer. I had assumed that the school that I had gone to knew what they were doing and had prepared me to be picked up, and that the companies hiring me would know what they needed and would know what to ask to find out if I fit. But it is forgivable that I should make that mistake the first time.  The truth, however, is that that was just the first of many careers that I embarked on without knowing what I was getting into.  In the absence of experience, it sometimes makes sense to see what happens.  In the end the choice that I made to take that first job gave me insight into what I could do, what the world needed, what the world was.  After 5 years I knew better what I wanted to do and take more deliberate steps. Unfortunately, I hadn't really learned the real lesson, that my days of learning would never end, that my view of the world would never stop expanding.  The end of that 5 years was when I came to the first of a series of ah-ha moments where I looked back and thought, "Now, now I really know what the world is about.  I only thought that I knew what it was about back then..."

My conversation with my friend, was just the latest in that series of epiphanies.  The difference is that these days, neither my friend nor I are surprised when we have them and neither of us presume that they won't happen again.  I imagine it as entering deeper and deeper into the woods until you come to a clearing and you can look around and get your bearings before you carry on along your journey.  Eventually, you end up in a place where you're satisfied with the view and you've seen enough to know that the place you are is as good as any you've visited or at least better than the some of the places that you weren't willing to stay, so you set up camp to rest; for a while at least.

Word of the Day

Often a word or phrase that I know is real will hound me until I look it up.  When I do, I can usually understand why in the same way that I attach meaning to a dream I've had.  Last night, or early this morning as was actually the case, the words that plagued me were "haggard" and "bedraggled".   Haggard was a word that I was familiar with.  In the past, I had used it carelessly to sympathize with a colleague at work and offended her.  Bedraggled, on the other hand, was one of those words that just sounds like it feels and I wasn't sure if it was a real word or just one that I wish were a real word.  I put it out of mind for a while, but I kept waking up. Since both haggard and bedraggled refer to appearance, they can't really describe how I felt, but having seen myself in the mirror after a month of not shaving made it clear why I had bedraggled on the brain. I'm pretty sure that if I looked half as bad as I felt, anyone would have called my appearance haggard.  I still haven't found exactly the word that I was looking for, but it must be akin to frazzled, exasperated, or burdened and enervated. I've been struggling with a problem that is exciting and frustrating, but right now, it's more frustrating than exciting and that's what has me so .... damn what's the word!

Writing Practice

In order to practice writing, I'm going to start a habit of writing. I encourage everyone who may be following this blog to un-follow the blog so as not to be overwhelmed with the trivialities of my wandering mind. 

William Zinsser's, in his book, "On Writing Well", he talked about unity. The first three elements of unity that he suggested, and on which he expounded, are person, tense, and mood.  Person is the point of view that one chooses for the article or piece. First person, participant, is how I am this article for example, but I could have chosen also to write it in the third person as an observer.  I could also have chosen to write in the second person, but I'm not a fan of that style.  Tense is the temporal point of view that one has to choose.  As he suggested, I have to decide where in time I'm primarily going to place the reader.  Am I going to be in the moment, as I am right now, or write in the past tense, as if telling a story about what happened? He pointed out that one can change tense where appropriate, but it should be relative to the time.  For example, I just asked a question about how I would choose to write in the future, but from the current point of view, "am I going to be"  I then went on to talk about how Zinsser, "suggested" and "pointed out".  I'm not sure if he would agree that that is appropriate.  The third element is mood.  I am writing in what I would consider an informal mood telling you about my experience.  I suppose if I were writing in the third person I would probably choose to be more formal. The concept of mood is probably going to be the toughest for me to control. With that in mind, I'm going to switch tasks and write some other thoughts unrelated to writing, so I'll do that in a different article. 

Scarcity

I often find myself searching for a word for a concept that I have in mind, but have no word to describe. Sometimes I have a word in mind that is close, but it has a connotation that is too specific and conjures an meaning that isn't what I'm looking for.

Last night, some time between 2:00 am and 5:00 am when I was tossing and turning and couldn't get back to sleep, I was thinking about scarcity. It started when I was listening to a news program about vaccines in Europe.  The Prime Minister of Austria was complaining about how European vaccine manufacturers had been exporting the vaccines to foreign destinations outside of Europe, but Europe had not been able to import any vaccines because of export restrictions by some of those same foreign companies on their manufacturers.

At first this struck me as a logical complaint, and one that pundits, politicians, and most people predicted as soon as the search for a vaccine began. The question was if rich countries are the ones developing the vaccine, how do we ensure that the poorer countries are not excluded from receiving a share of the vaccines.  A cynic would question how poorer countries could be sure that they would ever get the vaccine, but most polite politically minded folk simply left the question at, "... in a reasonable time for a reasonable cost".  Questions that this line of thinking raises are: Is it right for a country to refuse to export the vaccine before it has vaccinated enough of it's own population to get it's own economy back to a certain degree of stability?  Is it appropriate for a country to export a potentially life saving drug when it's own population (often just the historically underserved subset of the population) is suffering, just because it could be more profitable to sell it elsewhere? How do politicians justify not accepting the vaccine from political enemies, or putting conditions on providing vaccines to political enemies?

After considering those questions for a moment, I realized that they felt familiar. This winter when Texas was suffering from a severe cold spell (well at least severe for Texas), thousands of Texas residents were without power. It turns out that part of the problem was a shortage of natural gas for generating the power.  Politicians pointed fingers at the regulators from whom they had stripped all regulatory control.  Regulators pointed fingers at distributors and power generators. Power generators pointed fingers at natural gas suppliers, and natural gas suppliers pointed fingers at laws passed by politicians which protected.  All the while, those same natural gas suppliers were selling the natural gas at sky high prices to places outside of Texas.  So again, there is a scarcity of a commodity, and the population in the place that generates the commodity is suffering. While there is a layer of abstraction between the scarcity of the resource in this case and the impact on one's life, that isn't as clear as it is in the case of scarcity of the vaccine, it is a similar moral dilemma.

This same phenomenon exists also in the international oil markets.  Despite the fact that oil prices in the US might surge at points, our oil is not our own, it is a world wide commodity. Oil industry politicians argue that we should open up wilderness lands because we need to secure our oil reserves.  If securing our oil reserves is such a priority, is it right that they allow the oil companies to reap huge profits selling US oil on the open market instead of directing it to where they claim that it is needed to ensure our national security?

So the pattern here is as follows: a region has some commodity, because that commodity is scarce and demand is high within and outside of the region, the commodity is valuable. Does the producer of the commodity have a moral right to choose how they will distribute that commodity?  What role does the region's government have in that decision?  How should the government's investment in the development of the commodity influence the decision?  What other questions are there?  This leads me to the crux of my concern.  Is there a name for this phenomenon?  It seems like one that economists would have had to deal with before. 

Missing a Friend

My friend, Christie, just took leave of Austin on Friday after having been here for a while. It seemed harder to say good-bye this time, and perhaps that is because I had invested so much into her visit. Starting in early December, in preparation for her visit, I went into a self-imposed lockdown [COVID-2019]. Being that she is more cautious than anyone else in any of the non-overlapping circles of friends that I have, I felt a compunction to abide by a higher standard of restraint in my social interactions. She has good reason to be cautious as some of the other folks she is visiting were particularly vulnerable to the virus that has plagued us for the last year. I’ve been cautious, but only because of my own preference for solitude and isolation, and certainly not as strict as she. Anyway, I had invested a lot of energy and focus on being available for Christie, and she stayed longer than she had intended, which I thoroughly enjoyed. So, like any habit, it’s hard to suddenly break the habit of having her around.

I’ve been watching the icon floating along the highway across west Texas trying to predict here path, and imagine her experience. I hate driving, especially the kind of driving that she loves - out on a highway where the world is scrolling slowly past. For her, I think it is cathartic; I’m not sure why. For me it’s painful and tiring. I feel a heightened sense of paranoia, ever vigilant of the cars around me. If I go to fast I become annoyed by the cars ahead of me; if I go to slow I’m annoyed by the cars on my bumper. I get annoyed at people that drive in the wrong lane, or drivers that won’t pass and block the lane. And the frustration isn’t even for me, it’s a frustration for the other drivers around me who I imagine to be annoyed. As cautious as Christie is, I have no idea why those same things don’t bother her, but they don’t seem to. She says that she likes it being out on the highway. It’s driving in the cities that she says annoys her.

Why is this so much on my mind? I have so many other things to think about, but maybe that’s just it. Thinking about Christie is simple, and regular. She doesn’t look to me for answers and she’s good at making it pretty clear what she’s looking for from me. With other friends, I don’t know if they expect me to feel outraged or excited or sad just because they are. I can usually tell what they are feeling, but I rarely actually feel what they are feeling, so it’s difficult for me to know how to react or what to say.

She’s reached Northern California and I’m feeling more comfortable just watching her icon move along the highway. Just past Redding she’ll start seeing some trees, and I know that she feels the same about the trees as I do. There’s something calming like a re-assurance that all is not lost. I get that feel when I open my windows and hear the birds, or find a toad or a lizard in the garden. Seeing that nature is abundant and resilient makes me feel like we haven’t completely destroyed the world.  It makes me feel more secure that she is getting back to Oregon, so that she can see that all is not lost and nature hasn’t gone completely insane even if, as it seems, humanity has.