I'm tired, and that's never conducive to lucid writing

I for a handful of weeks I will show up to work and stare across a wide bay, knowing that I have come closer to my dreams than anyone in high school would have ever given me credit for. I realized today that my life has been fairly unpredictable. So many people have predictable lives, ones that you can lay out in a long sequence of expected events long before the events actually come to pass. Many people seem to flow like water down the path of least resistance, making all their decisions by never actually making their own. It’s like that line from High Fidelity. “I can see now I never really committed to Laura. I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and... I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.” Making those decisions that aren’t really decisions as much as they are intellectual delaying actions. Caving to someone else’s idea of what you should want to do or think, simply because it is easier to adopt someone else’s view than to parse one out for yourself. Taking a job or staying in a career just because it’s stable rather than because it’s anything you care about. Putting off those tough decisions only to wake up one day and realize it’s already been decided by inaction and now it’s too damn late to do a thing about it. Not that I can claim any real ambition. I have to set a course or drift. This is my course; this internship, this degree, these jobs in field biology or aquatic husbandry. But I still coast more than I would care to admit. I don’t know where I am going with this so, to spare you any more of my rambling...

Go see High Fidelity, read the book or better yet do both.

Then fail to represent your life as you know it.

"Is it the dream that one day you might be something you're not? Is it the dreams that make us real?"

"Even needs have needs, tiny giants made of tinier giants..."


I have an update. It’s long overdue.
I quit my job. I gave them three weeks notice so they could have an easier transition and my last working day was last Saturday. Letting them know of my impending exit went about as well as it could have. They offered me more money, part time work, and every other inducement they could think of to keep me on but I refused. And really, I think it would be dishonorable to fake quitting in an attempt to get a raise. If I felt that a raise was required I would have talked to them about it, not tried to manipulate circumstances. So needless to say, the Petco chapter is over. I liked the people I worked with. My complaints rested entirely with corporate and those customers who made life difficult. I quit my job with no sure next step. I am going to work on a Masters in Fishery Science out of OSU but hadn’t decided exactly which term I would start work on that.
This brings me to my next portion of the update. Just about the time I was nearing my last day I found out that I had been accepted for an internship at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific. It’s a 15 week program that allows me to train directly under one of the head aquarists, and teaches me how to be an aquarist myself. According to them, it will set me up so that once it's done I will be prepared to be hired as an entry level aquarist at a major aquarium. It’s a good deal and I am excited about the program. So as I pen this bit of info I am sitting on a couch in LA where I will be for the next 15 weeks. I will be living with my old college roommate which is another bonus for me. Elaine and I were coming into LA on vacation anyway and so for the first two weeks of the internship I’ll have her around. After that I will regrettably be deprived of her company for some time. But what can I do? This truly is a rare opportunity and I would be a fool to pass it up.

All you folks in Oregon wondering if I have fallen off the map or something, in my defense…..I sort of have.