Part of the reason this is no fun is that I'm choosing NOT to do something

"I'm not going to finish my PhD" doesn't have the same exciting quotient as "I'm going to graduate school in Wyoming." Choosing a negative, thats definitely part of the problem here. I've been lucky enough in life to spend most of my time agonizing over positive choices : who what where when why : to study, to live, to read, to be with.

In all of these choices there has been the implied negative choice: by coming to Wyoming I did not go to Arizona. The negative was in the background. Here: I'm not going to finish my PhD, the negative is in the foreground and the positive has yet to be determined. Some small part of me finds that exciting: maybe something truly unexpected will happen (a movie script, a career switch, the unknown unknowns). But most of me is consumed by looking for the positive. Because when I find it, I won't feel so uncertain.

Distractions and then hope

I haven't been ignoring the idea that I might not complete my PhD. I've been consumed by it and scared of it, so much so that I haven't bean ready to share it yet. Some unconscious damage control? Well, now it's out there. My head has been spinning with thoughts about my future : Teaching, first and foremost. Community college or high school? Trip to Thailand with my cousin? Should I move out of Laramie? I love living in Laramie, but it was never meant to be a long term prospect. Where should I get my teaching credential, if thats what I do? Could I still get in-state tuition at Cal State Long Beach? Teach for America? Do I need to wait tables in order to make ends meet this fall? Maybe swallowing my pride is the cost of going to Thailand for 6 weeks. I do want my PhD. I want to teach biology/ecology at the college or university level, but I just can't right now. I can't focus, the work doesn't self-motivate. I may regret this decision 10 years from now. But when that day comes I will try to remind myself that right now, this just isn't right. If the regret is deep enough, maybe I'll get my PhD then. But not now.

Hence the need for a little perspective. On to the next post and to reminding myself that 1) ending my graduate studies now does not mean I can't return to them later, 2) I've often thought about teaching high school, and 3) even with my PhD I've anticipated working at a community college. Maybe I'll start sooner than I expected.

Some perspective on my crisis of confidence

Erica Murray, a woman with whom I went to college but have not kept in touch, writes:

Miracles

I was in a cab this morning to Logan Airport and my loquacious driver queried my plans to the point where I found myself explaining to this perfect stranger that I was going to France to get my cancer cured.

And, to my shock, it appears that is indeed what I am doing.

Life’s pace, daily priorities, distractions distractions—and I just haven’t given this journey its due psychological, spiritual, or emotional prep. Funny how in speaking plainly to a taxi driver I finally heard where I was going.

Erica is writing about her life and leukemia at http://ericamurray.blogspot.com/





Erica's friend Erik is blogging at http://myyearofnewthings.blogspot.com/. Erik looks vaguely familiar to me but I don't think we knew each other at Oxy. Erik has been digging through his garage and found a newspaper review of a play at SCR in which the reviewer mistook him for Will Farrell. "THEN, on the next page of my scrapbook, there's a retraction that basically says "in last week's review of SCR's Pinocchio, we mis-identified the actor who played the stagehand as Eric Patterson.... I realize I'm about sixteen years too late, but I kind of want to send them a letter asking for an apology for misspelling my name. ("In the 1991 review of SCR's Pinocchio, we misspelled...")"

Reflecting on the high school diary he found:
I don’t know what this string of words says about sixteen-year-old Erik, but it makes me feel incredibly boring, and I wish that sixteen-year-old Erik would just come out of the closet and get laid already.

Much of Erik's blog is devoted to the recovery of his and Erica's friend Uma, who suffered a severe brain aneurysm in January of 2007.
…yell a message to Uma out your window, as loud as you can. Make it as un-PC as possible, because Uma likes it that way.

…even if you read this blog and don’t know Uma…even if you’re just coming across this blog post, randomly—a blog reader passing in the night—please take a second to tell a dirty joke, think a hopeful thought, and send out some love into the ether…

Back to the Winds

[update: I showed up 40 minutes after Enterprise rent a car opened and they had given my reserved car away. They didn't have any others. If they don't have one for me tomorrow I'll be driving my own car - which I don't want to do because of its axel issues and the 15-20 miles of dirt roads I face accessing the site.]
Pics from last time:

First trip to the Wind River Range

Poudre River here we come

We're going rafting tomorrow and I can't wait.

[update: I've never experienced such a time warp. I would have guessed we were on the river for 45 minutes when we were actually rafting for an hour and 45 minutes. What an awesome trip - most of the time we were on level three rapids but we also hit three or four level four rapids. Thanks to Tom and his wife.]

Permission granted

Today I got permission from the Tribal Water Engineer to put my automated stream sampler on the reservation. Agenda for next week: two days at the Cheyenne FACE site and a few days in the Wind Rivers - installing the sampler, looking around, and talking with some of the local Forest Service offices. Finally, research begins....

Hot

It snowed all last weekend in Laramie. Today its 101 in Tucson.

The loudest natural sound I have heard.

I walked out of my building today, heading across campus, and thought, it smells like rain. I don't know if it had been raining off and on, but a minute or two later it started to rain and hail. As I was walking under the eaves of another building, admiring the mix of rain and hail, its different patter, the way hail bounces in a way that rain does not, the way the hail continues to flow after hitting the ground, and then the way it melts onto the cement - well - ultimately I stopped walking and just used the eaves for protection. I was standing there admiring it all when the thunder began. It was close, with only a second or two between the lightening flash and the rolling thunder. I stood there for a few minutes in awe of it all, thinking about the sounds of the thunder and how it managed to be big and beautiful without being particularly loud, in the way a deep voice can fill a room but without being too strong. This was a sound heard for miles, but it was a pleasant grumbling, a reminder of the beauty of nature. After another few minutes there was a flash, and even before I counted to one, the thunder struck without preamble, earsplitting except that it was fast and low. I jumped and began to laugh. I wondered if the building to my left had been hit (it does not appear to have been). It was spectacular.

Arches and Canyonlands National Parks - Spring Break 2007

Here are some pictures from the great trip my friends Mark, Melissa, and I took to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks over Spring Break.

Arches and Canyonlands, Spring Break 2007

Josh Ritter

I am so excited about having found the music of Josh Ritter that it gets a posting front and center. I heard him first on NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7064853 - click on the "Related NPR links" for even more streaming music from Ritter on NPR) and I knew immediately that I was interested in his music. Here is his webpage (http://www.joshritter.com/news.php) and at the bottom left of that page you can download two of his songs for free. They're amazing.

Here, I'm going to link directly to them:
Girl in the War
Thin Blue Flame

another test post - and my yellowstone album

Click on the Yellowstone picture below to be taken to Picasa web albums (no account necessary to view my pictures. Dave (my advisor), Shikha (who runs the isotope lab for Dave), Jessie (a post-doc), and myself went to Yellowstone to sample CO2 coming out of the hydrothermal vents. Click here (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16392871/) to read what MSNBC had to say about it.

Yellowstone 2006

My first blogger post (well, no longer)

This used to be my first blogger post, but I have co-opted this once rambly entry to add pictures from Tahoe, Mojave, Baja California, and Hawaii.

Tahoe, Mojave, Baja, the big island