Times

It’s an interesting time to be alive. The 14th Dalai Lama can write an Op Ed in the New York Times about Islam, I can read decent articles about why the Tea party is, while fascinating, still wrong. I live in an age where I can be bashed by ad after ad while reading my opinion columns or I can go home and read an ad-free independent magazine. I can book and cancel a trip to a place as far away as Sri Lanka.

But I can’t help but feel as though it’s all too perfect. Of course the world has huge problems, no one would argue otherwise. But as fast as the technology grows to solve those problems, the faster we research how to prevent new ones it seems the faster they are created, and they seem to be bigger than the ones we used to have. I don’t know if that is what we call ‘getting old’, but the world’s problems seem larger than they ever were. I’m certain now that if we knew that we could fight a war that could essentially never have to end militarily, politically, geographically and financially, World War II wouldn’t have got its name. An endless war seems more painful than a world-wide one to me. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t see any lights at the end of the tunnel. I’m generally an optimistic person, about all things from career to love, but lately, it’s been hard to see things getting better. Especially with the Tea Party getting so much publicity. When did it become news that middle aged white men were angry about things they couldn’t control?

Or maybe I’m just mad that the genius of Pandora thinks I’m heavy into light rock today.
One of my biggest problems has been focus. If I don’t get results in the semi-immediate future on my own endeavors, I tend to get a bit disappointed. I get jaded and I start looking for new things to distract me. Hence my recent hemming and hawing about physician’s assistant school. All it really took was one shitty e-mail from the department of the health sciences program at Cleveland State to send me off looking for another future career. Luckily for me, we’re solidly into the summer semester, and it’s too late to really change my mind. All I can do at this point is apply for programs for the fall of 2011, which is what I’ve been doing all along.

I went to meet with someone in my old department’s counterpart today. After an interesting conversation in which she confirms that I would probably not be happy with research, I ran into a student I know who is working on her PhD. She looked happy, and when I asked her why, she said an experiment she’d been working on for 3 months finally worked today. And I grimaced. I don’t think I could do that, I thought. Wait 3 months, worrying maybe I’d gotten the theory wrong or the science wrong and wondering if anything would ever come of it.