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Leave the Peace Corps: build mud huts!
May. 28th, 2007 06:58 pmOh I wish I were joking- I've been so wildly productive in the ways of sustainable development in the last two weeks, it kind of makes me wonder why I left. (This is a big fat lie, but in the last two weeks, I have helped build an adobe hut, taught alternative bike maintenance (HURRAH FOR WELDING TORCHES!) and started building a fence out of wildfire recycled slabs. These are all worthy PC projects, and I suppose I'm not really surprised to be doing them at home.)
This weekend was also Blues Fest, which, just. Awesome as usual. People are amazing, and I love them. Of the thousand-billion people I caught up with: one just finished animating the next Be Good Tanya's video, one just got her Nurse Practitioner License and one got back from a five month tour of France playing bayou Tex-Mex music.
This is all well and good, of course, but it's just feeding into my HOLY COW WHAT THE HECK DO I DO NEXT anxiety. I'm aware that I've been awfully blessed- I have a fantastic, supportive family, I've lived a life filled with privilege and perspective, I'm academically smart. I feel a tremendous drive to DO something with all of that, but DANG. I'm paralyzed by options.
Here are the two things I know about myself:
(1) I know I'm interested in health, and more interested in hands-on-fixing of broken things than work with policy or politics.
(2) I know I have to be saving the world, or else I will feel like a complete waste of space on Earth.
Here is my thinking at the moment:
<1> I could go to medical school. I'd be a good doctor.
<2> Biomedical engineering would let me work with both robots and people (FTW!)
I'm feeling a lot of pressure to decide RIGHT NOW (oh god, graduate funding and stupid admissions deadlines and prereqs I haven't actually taken and why is that list so long?) and it's kind of twitching me out. Thankfully, there is an enormous slab fence that needs building, and that, at least is something I know how to do.
ETA: In amusing and ironic news: New Mexico is freaking cold since I've been back- a year in Jamaica, and suddenly, eighty degrees with no humidity is time to be breaking out the long sleeves.
This weekend was also Blues Fest, which, just. Awesome as usual. People are amazing, and I love them. Of the thousand-billion people I caught up with: one just finished animating the next Be Good Tanya's video, one just got her Nurse Practitioner License and one got back from a five month tour of France playing bayou Tex-Mex music.
This is all well and good, of course, but it's just feeding into my HOLY COW WHAT THE HECK DO I DO NEXT anxiety. I'm aware that I've been awfully blessed- I have a fantastic, supportive family, I've lived a life filled with privilege and perspective, I'm academically smart. I feel a tremendous drive to DO something with all of that, but DANG. I'm paralyzed by options.
Here are the two things I know about myself:
(1) I know I'm interested in health, and more interested in hands-on-fixing of broken things than work with policy or politics.
(2) I know I have to be saving the world, or else I will feel like a complete waste of space on Earth.
Here is my thinking at the moment:
<1> I could go to medical school. I'd be a good doctor.
<2> Biomedical engineering would let me work with both robots and people (FTW!)
I'm feeling a lot of pressure to decide RIGHT NOW (oh god, graduate funding and stupid admissions deadlines and prereqs I haven't actually taken and why is that list so long?) and it's kind of twitching me out. Thankfully, there is an enormous slab fence that needs building, and that, at least is something I know how to do.
ETA: In amusing and ironic news: New Mexico is freaking cold since I've been back- a year in Jamaica, and suddenly, eighty degrees with no humidity is time to be breaking out the long sleeves.
