Finish Line Ahead

I will blog more about Spain later, when I have my photos all nice and loaded up.

The other night I was at Trader Joe's, just getting some milk. I noticed there were several long-ish lines (for Trader Joe's anyway) at the checkout counters, but the one at the left end of the occupied counters had one person who was about to be done, so I went to it. As soon as I settled there, a man's voice to the left asked, "Are you a philosopher?"

I looked and where I thought there was an unmanned counter there was a worker, with no line in front of him. I walked and I said, "Not yet anyway." He replied while looking me in the eye and taking my groceries, "I hope not. Because if you can't find the free check-out counter in the grocery store, you'll never find the truth."

He continued as he rang me up, "And you know, most people think that the truth, it's like rays of light that shine down from above." He paused as he looked at me deeper, not really leaning in but pulling me somewhat closer with his eyes. "But you will not find the truth as revelation. If you want to find the truth, you have to walk through the darkness. In the depths of the darkness where no one likes to tread is where the truth lies." He bagged my last item and I walked out the door.

I think that statement is profoundly true. When I was still a Christian, one of the aspects of Jesus that I most sought to replicate and admire (and admittedly I still do) was the part where he "ate with sinners." This had a true effect on my understanding and interpretation of the faith and the way of life, but many of the authority figures around me often dismissed this aspect somewhat when I would try to explain it, or at the least they rarely encouraged it.

At this point it should be noted that this entry has been written over three separate periods, each time with me meaning to finish it, but always getting interrupted before my thoughts finished. Here's some more:

I've been working on getting the sort of ideal traineeship in China: a year in a fundamentally non-Western country, a place where I can learn a major world language, working in renewable energy and utilizing somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, engineering. I have been in talks with a company but it's slowing down, so I'm not sure how that's going to work out. So I am expanding my traineeship search. I'm probably going to apply to MindValley, which would be so off the chain, and a couple of other places. We'll see - main thing is to get out into a worthwhile thing for my own interests and development, and to wait out this economic thing. I like to read fivethirtyeight a lot because Nate Silver does a good job of making statistically interesting projections and analyses of the economic situation, which is hard to understand, at least as much as I would like to understand it - which is profoundly deeply.

Very soon I'll be done with GT and then I think people will see someone return who hasn't been here in a while - a calmer, more amicable me. My own mother tells me how much less happy I seem now than I did before college, and with an awesome trip to be taken in May with people I really want to be with and the prospect of a year of new developments, I think my mind will sufficiently rest and recharge itself, along with my soul.

Gone Ramblin'

It only just hit me that, oh, I leave for the airport to go to Spain with my sister in a few minutes.

The first time I went to Spain it was like this huge movement and upheaval, but the next time I left the US for another country - to Istanbul, Turkey - it was more like sitting down in a room for 15 hours and then walking out in a new place. It wasn't a huge upheaval, it was just there. I think that's when I truly realized that travel had changed me at the core.

I like that a lot. I hope my sister will come to understand the same thing.

Another Set

I don't have much time before I need to lay me down, but I need to continue the exercise.

I have an unholy mountain to climb in the next 72 hours. On Wednesday I have two tests and a presentation, on Thursday I have a test, and it ends about six hours before I need to be at the airport to volar a España.

It's so much that I almost can't even "see" Spain over the mountaintop. I have to give myself solace in the fact that I only have five Mondays left at Georgia Tech (not counting finals week). That's nice.

Another huge difficulty is in our senior design project, the maglev train. Very, very ambitious. Too ambitious probably. We'll see. We'll pass anyway, but barely. F+. Click.

I probably won't get truly struck with excitement for Spain until I'm there. That's just the way it tends to be with me and travel, it's just going down the road. It's all a long road that goes on forever, not some huge exciting sea change.

But I am of course looking for that sea change, if and when it comes. I'm ready for something completely new. New parts of my brain need to be stretched, and the parts that have been blown out and salted over for the last five years need time to heal. Whatever it takes. But the learning curve can't stop.

Catching Up

It's been a really long time since I've posted, which isn't great. I've tried to keep up better as a legitimate right-brain exercise, since that's definitely a mental muscle I don't want to lose.

There are now less than two months until I graduate from Tech with a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, with a co-op and international plan certificate, and a Spanish minor. I am counting down every day; it's like being on a very long run and seeing the finish line get closer. I am pretty much just on momentum right now with inertia, but I try to run every now and then - in real life and in this metaphor.

Speaking of running, I've run more regularly recently, at least three or four times a week for the past few weeks, but I've been sick with a mild ear infection since the weekend. The medicine leaves me really dehydrated and I overheat easily so I can't keep it up for now; disappointing since I want to badly to get back into a routine for getting back into shape. I've been (generally) eating better as well, or at least eating more consciously.

Last weekend was RoKS, which was my last in fact - my first was way back three years ago the same weekend in Jacksonville, FL in the spring of 2006. We went down there all the way because we had to accommodate the three kids from Miami to come there; naturally they quickly died out as they had before. Wasted money and time by the higher-ups. Anyway, I was a faci at our RoKS and it was a good experience, although I think a lot of the flow of the conference could have been better. I still made my session enormously late but I think I facilitated one good session I made with Dani from UNC about the AIESEC Way and the AIESEC Experience, and my big thing was to make it so the delegates got into small groups and had 30 seconds each to describe their most pivotal AIESEC Experience to the group. The person per group who gave the best story within the 30 second limit came to the front and said it to the whole session. It was designed to both prep them for the idea of selling the AIESEC Experience through their stories (and to keep the stories short and understandable) and to hopefully get the newbies hooked on the sweet stories of older members. I think it was a good move because the people who came to the front of the room had really interesting stories. Also we did a Twitter feed for the conference, you can see the results here.

I am listening to some really fresh rap on WREK right now on Wrekroom Renaissance. It's making for the perfect background.

Most of what's driving me on this blog is my interest in content creation. Think about how many people have really interesting and constructive ideas but don't ever put them down for anyone to know about? A great novel, a hit song, solutions to problems, a new recipe, an allsome film? We're uniquely lucky with the Internet to be very easily able to put information out for the whole world to see. Of course, this has to come with the right expectations of responsibility and a good bit of education on it, but I sure hope they never censor the Internet. Freedom is great.

Recently I've had several conversations in which I spent a while trying to explain my views on things like politics, religion, morality, the economy, etc. and it goes on a really long time and people get lost. Then at the end they say "you have to be thinking really long term, aren't you?" And I say "Of course I am!" I know most everyone's capable of thinking really long-term, but maybe a lot more people are indeed focused on the really short or medium term and not about their long-term future, or that of their children. I'll have to figure out how to better frame the logical progression from our current state to my desired vision so people see how it is causal and relates to the here and now.

Oh man, now it's that sweet funk on WREK, Electric Boogaloo. I LOVE Thursday nights. So very solid.

Only a week until I leave for Spain with my sister. We're going to Sevilla, Valencia for the Fallas where I'll stay with my old roommates, and Madrid. Truly she will learn the way of the nomad.

Okay, about time to hit it.