2001-10-09 - 11:54 a.m.
Rebellion, and the Benefits of Having a Brother

Okay, so the armed forces idea is a no-go. After peering over the details of officer school and the combination of submission and leadership required, it is as repulsive to me as the idea of continuing in the office-and-cubicle world. My rebellious streak, while a little more mature and focused than the last time I really let it out, is still just as impossible to argue with as it ever was.

The problem is, I am not educated for any of the jobs I really want, and I can't afford the necessary education. Instant quicksand trap for the unwary, and another seldom-noticed downside of American Culture: if you don't choose extremely early what you're going to do, and stick with it, you're never going to get ahead. Extremely early, as in mid-high-school. What kid that age is really mature enough to decide what they are going to do with the rest of their lives?

No, I take it back. It has nothing to do with maturity and everything to do with experience. How can you be certain you'll love your chosen career, until you have a taste of it? Pinning job choices on high-schoolers is like Russian Roulette in reverse. Instead of a bullet, you have an exciting career, and everyone else is SOL. (No, not the sun, the excremental expression).

The funny thing is, they say our generation will change careers between six and ten times in their lives. So I guess people don't really stick with their early choice for "the rest of their lives". At the same time, though, that statistic still illustrates my point: the early choice is usually not the right one. And when you're too poor to make shift to a job you would really enjoy, each job change really doesn't get you anywhere at all.

Perhaps I'm still too young at 23 to appreciate that I have decades yet to settle into a happy life. My veins buzz as much with impatience as caffeine, and I can't bear the thought of taking this job-change opportunity to find myself in a place even less inspiring, career-wise. Or perhaps it's not physical youth talking, but mental age. According to my IQ, my mental age is roughly 35 ... a little early for "midlife crisis", but certainly around the right age to be panicking over lack of acheivement towards life goals.

Well, at least I'm not depressed anymore; I know things are going to work out, and I am determined to do something to make that happen. There's a side-effect to this process though ... I think I've figured out why depression has always been such an instinctive response to crisis in my life. It saps all my extra nervous/irritated energy, and keeps me from driving myself insane with impatience! I feel like I'm grinding my gears ... gritting my teeth ... and all I can do is keep my eyes on the exits, and one foot continually in front of the other.

On an entirely different side note, I had a rather amusing AHA! experience with my brother this weekend. We were driving home from our parents' house about 8pm on Sunday. After a close encounter or two on the freeway, we launched into a discussion of bad drivers vs. good drivers, and what the differences are. (The major points, of course, were knowing your own car well enough that it's like an extension of you while you're behind the wheel, and being able to split your attention well enough to do things like hold a conversation, turn the radio on, etcetera without endangering the lives of everyone else on the road.)

The most interesting part of the discussion came in the middle of our rants about drivers who have problems paying enough attention to the road. I was going off about a friend of mine who is so directionally focused that changing lanes is always a life-threatening ordeal. She has no concept of traffic flow. To illustrate my point to Azash, I started launching in to my traffic-by-mathematics spiel. Vectors, relative speeds, dynamic three-dimensional models, being abe to judge necessary rates of acceleration and insertion angles at a glance, etcetera, etcetera.

I've NEVER met anyone who did more than raise their eyebrows at that speech, before. It gives my traffic-challenged friend headaches, in fact. My brother, however, grabbed the ball and ran with it. "Totally!" he exclaimed, and started in about old green-screen computers and graphical representations and tracking and the similarities to the kind of mental exercizes a military pilot or an air-traffic controller has to be able to do instinctively.

*blink* went the Shell; and then I started to giggle. How long have I known my brother? 21 years now, since his birthday was last month. We've logged hundreds of hours together in the car. I can't believe I never talked traffic theory with him before now. And I can't believe we both came to the same theory independently! It makes sense, though; we're both decent at math, great with computers, and have a fierce love of intense strategy games. It trains the mind to think ahead and juggle several variables at once, without wasting too much concentration on any one detail.

Thank God my parents had a boy as their second child, and not another girl. Not that I don't enjoy feminine pursuits, but I think playing things like army men and tinkertoys and RISK while growing up instead of tea party and dress-up and Truth-or-Dare was a lot more useful to my mental development. =)