True worth, shared trauma, up in the air

So aside from [im]material things, my life has been pretty mundane over the past week, and I haven’t had much to say. But then listening to NPR yesterday, one of the hosts said “Top Kill, Blast Guard (or something like that), what’s with all these macho names?” And another host asked retorted jovially, “So you think if we were more sensitive to the oil spills feelings it would stop?” She responded flatly, “Well I just wanted to point out that we’re using all these macho names for things that don’t work.”

So off I go to my summer internship at Arcadis, an international environmental engineering firm, to do some remediation work. HR told me I might be doing work with BP (oh? What remediation work could they possibly need done?) But my boss said I actually don’t have any set projects yet, and also said I didn’t need to do any advance reading before getting to San Francisco. Gotta love environmental engineers.

What I’ve really been thinking about (aside from the dream I had last night where I won an iMac, or whatever Apple’s desktop is right now-I don’t care Apple, I don’t think you’re more valuable than Microsoft.) is the fact that we are all heading in different directions for the summer, but this is what it’ll be like at graduation, just permanent. I have bonded with the people I have met at MIT in different ways than I have bonded with other people I’ve met along the way. It’s sorta like the bond the victims of a trauma share, like those survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. We’re all in our parallel universes but for a moment they all intersected. Unlike people brought together by circumstance, the people I’ve met at MIT arrived at MIT by-and-large for specific reasons, landing at this crazy institute for specific interests and values. So that is something we all share. But in a year (or so, to be explained) I’ll be leaving it, and so will most of the rest of my closest friends. Some of my friends are leaving it as I write this. I just can’t see myself coming home to a quiet, empty apartment (which is what I’ll be doing this summer). Yes, ultimately I will marry and have kids, but until that happens, what? My current 6 (7 if you include that I have 1 more year as an undergrad) is to stick around for my master’s degree at MIT, work for two years, then go to law school. But what kind of work do I want to do for those two years? Paralegal? Consulting? Those two years are the ones I need to think about more. Any suggestions? This isn’t a didactic or expository post, this is just one of me spilling out my thoughts.

I’m writing this on an airplane. Was Matt Damon wearing eyeliner in that South Africa movie? I also really don’t enjoy flying. The flight time is what is keeping me from going back to Asia.

Another funny comment they made (you have to love the tongue-in-cheek NPR hosts): if we plug up the oil leak, won’t the Earth swell up and explode?”